Year: 2005

Social Tools – Ripples to Waves of the Future.

Shortly after last December’s tsunami, Dina Mehta and a group of fellow bloggers began what started as a blog (The South East Asia Earthquake and Tsunami Blog), grew into a wiki, and became an important experiment and case example of the power of new technologies to support and amplify bottoms-up organizational invention. She’s now written up her analysis and report on that effort from the inside. It’s long, but, as an ethnographer, Dina has created an important story about realizing the potential of these new tools when used in the right ways with the right energy. Lots there for all of us to learn from. Thank you Dina!

Social Tools – Ripples to Waves of the Future.I’ve been meaning to share in detail my tsunamihelp story and experiences – and I got the opportunity to pen my thoughts and reflections when David Gurteen asked me for an article for the Global Knowledge Review. This is the full text of the article – its fairly long by ‘blog’ standards, but it needs to be shared in its entirety :).

ESJ: A strategy for personal knowledge management

Jack Vinson provides a nice summary of what I had to say last week about personal knowledge management in his class on knowledge management. It’s a notion that I am continuing to explore. Another cut at finding an answer to the question that I find intriguing in my newest column at Enterprise Systems Journal. I try to build an argument that it is in each of our selfish, best, interests to develop and adhere to a strategy for personal knowledge managemment.

What is PKM, anyway?

As Jim McGee said, he was a guest speaker in my KM class Wednesday night, talking about personal knowledge management (PKM). He primarily gave us a framework on which he builds the idea of a PKM strategy, and he told a bunch of stories to help people get the idea. Jim’s framework consists of three components

  1. Portfolio. The portfolio serves as a record of work done, a backup brain, and as a sales tool (just as an artist’s portfolio is an advertising tool).
  2. Manage Learning. The portfolio also serves as a tool for reflection on how the work went last time and how it could be better. This is also an under-emphasized aspect of PKM.
  3. Master the Toolkit. Reflect on learning and reflect on how you use the tools of your trade.

Portfolios are critical to the concept of knowledge work as craft work. And though people frequently get lost in conversations about the technology, nearly everyone does some version of this. How many files, emails and pictures are archived on your computer? With the discussion of PKM, one goal is to be smarter about how we manage the portfolio.

Managing learning is an aspect of PKM that frequently gets overlooked. The knowledge worker needs to be aware of how she works and look for opportunities to work more effectively. (I almost said “continually look for opportunities,” but I realize that this begins to seem like a knowledge worker could get lost in constant navel-gazing. A couple students pushed on this issue in the discussion.) The point is that the knowledge worker’s regular process needs to include reflection. I believe this is the power behind the Carnegie program, Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits, David Allen’s Getting Things Done and similar processes: they offer a process by which people can think about what is important, act against that knowledge, and review both the action and the direction for the next time (sounds like “plan, do, check, act“).

Mastering the toolkit gets too much verbiage. It’s far too easy to get lost in playing with new tools, whether that is a circular saw or a wiki. PKM begins to look a lot like personal information management in these cases. At the same time, part of the reflection process can include a review of how I use the tools and whether there are better tools available. I can choose to seek out new tools when there is enough friction with the current tools (tool geek), or I can rely on my larger network of friends and colleagues and contacts to introduce me to tools that they find particularly helpful. In the class discussion we recognized that each knowledge worker will require a different set of tools because we have our own processes for doing things.

Yet, there is something that still doesn’t sit right for people. Denham Grey has argued that knowledge is socially constructed, so personal knowledge management doesn’t make sense. In a different twist, I would include understanding the skills and interests of my nearby networks to be at least as important as remembering where I filed that report. This would make my networks another part of my portfolio, including the fact that my network can be used to help sell my skills and services.

Comments

– jackvinson (jackvinson@jackvinson.com) [Knowledge Jolt with Jack]

Business Blogs: A Practical Guide is Now Available

Bill Ives and Amanda Watlington have released their study of business blogging. I was one of the many bloggers Bill interviewed and if the insight and cogency of his questions are any guide, this is going to be well worth your time. I’m certainly looking forward to learning what they have to say about the topic and what their subjects had to say as well.

Business Blogs: A Practical Guide is Now Available. Yesterday, we announced the availability of our book, Business Blogs: A Practical Guide. Amanda Watlington and I have been working on this for the past eight months and it is great to see it out. As we said in the… [Portals and KM]

Generic meeting summary.

I’ve had reason to appreciate this sentiment far too many times in faculty meetings, partner meetings, and other settings where ego and brains fight for dominance. Worth remembering. Thank you Espen.

Generic meeting summary.

I think this goes for most meetings:

“[…] a […] faculty meeting is not over when everything has been said, it is only over when everything has been said by everyone. By my count, we’re about 2/3 done with the first criteria but only about 1/4 done with the latter.”

Not that I am not guilty of spurious (and oh so well formed) rambling overspecifications myself.

From ProfessorBainbridge.com via Infectious Greed.

[Applied Abstractions]

Happy blogversary to Jack Vinson

Congratulations to Jack on his 2nd blogversary. I can remember encouraging him to star his blog based on the cogent emails and comments I would get from him in response to my postings. We all won by getting him to share his insights.

Tonight, I’ll be a guest lecturer in Jack’s classs. I’ll be talking about the notion of personal knowledge management and why you might want to think about it explicitly.

2nd blogversary for Knowledge Jolt with Jack

I started this blog two years ago with the first of my (currently) 122 entries in the “events” category about David Weinberger speaking for AKMA at Seabury-Western. Funny that it turned out we’d have a baby on the 18th of May in 2004. And this year, I am teaching a class on knowledge management at Northwestern on this anniversary and birthday.

Happy day!

Comments

– jackvinson (jackvinson@jackvinson.com) [Knowledge Jolt with Jack]

Tom Peters Wire Service launches

And it’s got an RSS feed here. So now we have that wonderful combination of insightful editorial filtering with a format the flows into my information space on my terms. While the dinosaurs at Syndicate try to figure out how to preserve their obsolete business models, Tom Peters and crowd are forging ahead.

TP Wire Service Launches. There’s something new from the tompeters.com team, and I think it’s COOL! Check out the TP Wire Service. We’ve… [The Tom Peters Weblog]

My dinner with Buzz – time to get back to practicing blogging

I caught up with Buzz last week face-to-face. We were both in Cambridge, MA and managed to find time for some pizza at Bertucci’s followed by ice cream at Herrells. If you live in Cambridge, you likely know of Herrells. Those of you who don’t, should make the pilgrimage if quality ice cream is important to you.

Buzz chided me on my less than prolific blogging recently. The usual excuses apply; travel, new client projects, family sporting events when I am in town, etc., etc. But he’s right. I haven’t been making as much time for this practice as I should. Some of the issue is managing and rethinking the split between public and private blogging. I originally began using these tools as a backup brain and as an amplifier on my ability to stay informed about topics that matter to me. I still spend substantial time tracking topics using RSS and my aggregator, but much of that doesn’t find its way into McGee’s Musings nor should it.

I also use my local blog as the place where I draft and work out various ideas for my client projects and other efforts. Again, that is material that is frequently not ready for wide dissemination.

While I find these tools immensely important to my long term productivity as a knowledge worker, I still find it a difficult concept to sell. I don’t think we really give tools the importance they deserve if we are knowledge workers. If you’re reading this, most likely you’ve made this conceptual leap already. But how often do we encounter conversations like the one Rex Hammock reported last week on a question by Ellis Booker, “ What were you trying to achieve with your blog in the first place?”

I agree with Rex. I didn’t start this with a well-developed business case or a clear plan. The out-of-pocket costs to play with these new technologies are close to zero. The time costs can be a different question, but the potential payoffs are what is absolutely critical. And none of it fits into a business case any better than trying to calculate the future value of a newborn baby. You’ve got to live it to create whatever value is going to be found.

Here’s my analogy. We’re about where Frederick Taylor was when he started trying to figure out how to make manual, repetitive work more productive. Figuring that out was science at its most fundamental; observe, experiment, learn, repeat. The sooner you start, the faster you learn. If you continue the process, the most that anyone following you can do is to catch up to where you are now. Waiting for the answer is a sucker’s bet. It’s the person doing the practicing that gets better, not the spectator in the stands. So, Buzz, you’re right.

Latest ESJ Column – Crafting Uniqueness in Knowledge Work

I have another column up at ESJ. I’ve been arguing that knowledge work is best thought of from a craft perspective for a long time. This time I took a look at knowledge work deliverables and came to a new insight (I’m just a bit slow sometimes). Knowledge work products achieve their value from their uniqueness not their uniformity.

This contributes to the failings most organizations have had with their efforts at knowledge management. Managing activities in an industrial economy is about achieving and enforcing uniformity. When it works, we get the PC revolution where my computer gets better and faster and more reliable every year. When it doesn’t, we get everyone in the call center reading from the same debugging script after I’ve been on hold 30 minutes while they ignore the problem diagnosis I’ve already done before I ever called.

Knowledge management efforts need to be rethought to bring this issue to the forefront. They need to put attention toward how to enable knowledge workers to be more proficient at creating unique results, not at creating an artificial uniformity that undermines the real point of knowledge management in the first place. The more sophisticated your knowledge workers, the more likely they are to ignore ill-conceived efforts toward uniformity. Also, the more likely they are to support efforts that address their real concerns.