More on Personal Knowledge Management from Martin Roell

Martin Roell writes the blog, Das E-Business Weblog: Internet, IT, Management, Zukunft. Die Welt aus Sicht eines Consultants. In commenting on Tom Davenport's talk on personal knowledge management, he offers extensive comments and points to a talk he gave on a similar theme - Distributed KM - Improving Knowledge Workers' Productivity and Organisational Knowledge Sharing with Weblog-based Personal Publishing - Paper presented to BlogTalk 2.0, The European Conference on Weblogs, Vienna, July 5th and 6th 2004.

He starts his paper with an excellent point:

“Improving the productivity of knowledge workers is one of the most important challenges for companies that face the transition from the industrial economy to an economy based on information and knowledge (Drucker, 1999). However, most "knowledge management" efforts have failed to address this problem and focused on information management instead.”

Blogs can play a useful role here and I have posted on this several times. As Dave Pollard, former CKO for a large professional services firm, writes in his blog, “Weblogs could be a mechanism to coherently codify and 'publish' in a completely voluntary and personal manner the individual worker's entire filing cabinet, complete with annotations, marginalia, post-its and personal indexing system.”

Martin’s paper is quite extensive and useful. Here is part of his conclusion.

“Traditional knowledge management has failed to address the problem of knowledge worker productivity. Tools that have been developed in KM focused on information management and do not support many of the key knowledge work processes. Knowledgeworkers have therefore adpated the email client to suit their needs. It has become the most successful knowledge work tool because it combines personal control with personalisability and integrates communication. Weblogs support knowledge workby providing a space to capture information, annotate it, reflect, get feedback, share, discuss and network with others. Additionally they provide organisational benefits: They improve data on the intranet, capture experience, make it visible and disseminate it through storytelling. They help to provide the grounds for a learning organisation and support the forming of networks and communities of practise. Weblogs in organisations need not replace other KM and information management systems. They should be seen as a complement to and an augmentation of existing systems. “

In addition to the comments on web blogs, a key point is that knowledge management systems have failed when they do not focus on key business processes and serve only as general information systems. Here is a link to two of several posts that address this issue of the need to align knowledge management with business processes to provide value: Ever-increasing ability to implement an early vision of KM and Is KM the Killer App for Portals?

Comments

[Steve]

Your blog is great, just sorry it took so long to find it. Your posts on peer to peer collaboration, blogging/journals and their role in personal information management etc are really interesting. I have about 20 tabs open in my browser right now with links from your site that I want to read. My blog has some simillar themes.

Thanks Again