Personal knowledge management and body of work

Got an email from my old colleague, Chunka Mui, this week that read

Here’s an out of the past question — do either of your archives have a copy of that HBS case study that included the Andersen AI work on FSA and Eloise? I got a message from an old colleague looking for it.

It wasn’t an unreasonable request.

Surprisingly, I was able to track down a copy. How that played out, however, is worth reviewing for what it might reveal about personal knowledge management in the real world.

The case study is a piece of my body of work. I wrote it in 1986, early in my doctoral studies. It’s out of print as near as I can discover. A digital copy, if it still existed, would be in Microsoft Word 2.0 format, predating Windows.

I was pretty sure that I had kept a physical copy. But that was five addresses and two downsizings ago. It wasn’t in the one file cabinet that was on the third floor. Eventually, I did find a hard copy in a stack of articles and file folders up on a shelf in a closet in my office. All of my old case studies are in that pile. At some point, I pulled them together with every intention of scanning them.

So. Is this a win, loss, or draw for my personal knowledge management system? It’s a win for Chunka. He got his answer in less than a day.

I got him that answer in less than a day. But it doesn’t feel like a win to me. Is that an indictment of my system or of my assessment? What I feel should have taken a few minutes turned into an hour or more spread throughout the day. All dependent more on my memory than on anything systematic in my practices. Plenty of room for improvement.

 

One thought on “Personal knowledge management and body of work”

  1. I feel like content management is an under-appreciated skill. The ability to find an obscure document quickly because it was in the right place seems to garner a high-five from no one other than myself. And yet the time saved – for you and your requestor – is a gift to both of you.

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