What is the role of KM?

Now that I'm a regular Twit(terer), I find it quite hard to blog. This is largely because, in comparison to Twitter, the bar to hitting the keyboard seems much higher. I feel I need to have something deep to say before I blog. And, er, OK, let's leave it there.

Paradoxically it's a link from Twitter to a blog post on a very deep subject that has prompted this post. John Tropea tweeted about a blog post by Mark Gould which discussed a blog post and paper by Patrick Lambe . In essence the argument put forward is that knowledge sharing is about a lot more than just getting thoughts onto (virtual) paper in public places and spreading them around using technology. The author went on to argue that knowledge managers ought to be taking account of the psychological processes that are involved in knowledge transfer. Indeed, the author seemed altogether impatient with a technology-based approach to knowledge sharing.

This prompted me to reassess my own position. Being a short attention-span Twit these days, I'll be brief. I agree that knowledge-sharing is a rich and complex subject. But I don't think it's the job of knowledge managers to be concerned with all aspects of the process. This is for two reasons. The first is that most of us don't have time to complete the in-depth academic study needed to become the true KM all-rounder implied by Lambe. The second is that many aspects of knowledge-sharing are better left to the individuals who have the knowledge and who are doing (or attempting to do, or would do if they had the facilities) the knowledge sharing.

I've never really liked the phrase 'knowledge manager'. It's too overblown, pretentious. We are concerned with facilitating the sharing of certain types of information, that's all. If we get a bit dry and technical about it at times, it's because that's a big part of the job.

Do you agree?

Social Computing in Business

The talk seemed to go down well. It turned into more of a workshop, really, which is what I really wanted. I tried to cover a very broad field in one hour, which was a challenge. I began by checking knowledge levels, and by asking who was more interested in the tools and who in the business-related issues. I got a strong vote for the latter. Nevertheless I did a run-through of the tools, and dwelt a bit on the concept of 'small pieces loosely joined', and the 'glue' of tagging, folksonomy, RSS and so on. There were some ah-ha moments with Delicious, when I explained how the social tags provided an alternative way into the web to Googling.

I covered adoption barriers such as security, 'fear of The Cloud', Chinese Walls and corporate politics, and emphasised that these were important issues but that they aren't insuperable. Towards the end we looked at the idea of companies becoming perhaps more human places as a result of the adoption of social computing / Enterpise 2.0'. That struck a chord with quite a few people. Given that many of them were in jobseeking mode, this did not surprise me. We also talked about the potential value of loose ties when it come to networking in general.

One of the most interesting things for me was to be reminded how broad this topic is, and how it touches on some quite deep issues such as personal identity, organisational behaviour, the role of management and the nature of work.

Here's a link to my talk outline on Mind42.

Social Computing in Business

I'm giving a talk this evening at TfpL on the subject of Social Computing in Business. This is, of course, a very broad field, and it will be a challenge to cover even parts of it in the hour available. But I'm sure it will be interesting. I'm looking forward at least as much to hearing what the audience has to say on the subject as I am to saying my piece.

Corporate Knowledge-sharing: a glimmer of hope

Recent experience in a large professional services firm has confirmed a number of my expectations about difficulties in facilitating knowledge-sharing in such an environment. In no particular order:
- Dear old Sharepoint both enables and inhibits, in roughly equal measure. Yes it's got lots of features, but many of them are mediocre and it's a clunky, unintuitive piece of kit to build anything with.
- Security concerns, standardisation of builds, etc inevitably mean what's available to the staff behind the firewall is disappointing compared with the burgeoning Web 2.0 world at large on the Web.
- The email habit runs very deep, and won't be shifted easily.

I'm still optimistic that we can make a go of this KM initiative, though. Why? Because there is strong business need and because senior people are behind it. Essential, though often lacking in KM-related work. What's more, there's an understanding that there needs to be a move from email silos to open, web-based discussion and document sharing. It's 'just' a question of changing habits. And on that note I've discovered than those of us who've been using the web for years need to remember that not everyone understands how to copy a URL and paste it into an email. In fact, 'basic training' might be one of the key requirements for success.

Could URL shorteners break the Web?

Many of us use URL shorteners like www.tinyurl.com and www.bit.ly. For Twitter they are well-nigh essential, if you're not to use up your whole 140 character quota with a single URL.

I think it was Euan Semple in his Twitter incarnation @euan, who originally alerted me to the idea that these shortener sites might be a risk to the architecture of the web. As every schoolboy knows, the Internet was designed to continue functioning after major structural damage, such as that which might follow a nuclear war. It does this by virtue of its addressing system, which allows messages, in the form of 'packets', to be routed through many possible pathways, so that they always get through even if some pathways are blocked. Unfortunately URL shortening might be able to jeopardise this welcome redundancy. Shortening works (I think - correct me if wrong) by the storage on the shortener's server of a match between the shortened URL and the original one. Someone who clicks on the short URL gets redirected to the original (long) one. In theory, if a shortener's server went offline, because for example the shortener went bust, all the links would be lost.

What's to be done? There are a number of shorteners, so using a range of them reduces the consequences of failure of any one of them. But the impact could still be significant, especially if the most popular one failed. And the more paranoid might even see possibilities of duress here, should a shortener fall under the control of an ill-intentioned person. Admittedly the consequences of failure of any 'cloud' service, including good old webmail, could have serious consequences, but those are arguably less systemic than shortener failure would be.

Should there be some sort of process for putting URL shortener databases into escrow, or is there another answer, perhaps?

World Wide Web is twenty

'Twenty years ago this month, something happened at CERN that would change the world forever: Tim Berners-Lee handed a document to his supervisor Mike Sendall entitled "Information Management : a Proposal". "Vague, but exciting" is how Mike described it, and he gave Tim the nod to take his proposal forward. The following year, the World Wide Web was born.'

http://www.w3.org/2009/03/CERNweb20th.html

"Information Management : a Proposal": understatement of the century?

Transport Chaos

Thanks to Euan Semple for pointing me to this one. (Before you ask the relevance to this blog, it's a mashup):