Yesterday, I had the chance to attend David Gurteen's workshop session conducted by IBM on Knowledge Management. David's session was brief and took only a few minutes, but worth the attendance, while the rest of the day talk was for IBM to sell their products.
Anyhow with David's session, I gain a lot on the KM body of knowledge. Many interesting questions arises during the sessions including.
- The quality of context from the open collaboration community.
- The comparison of KM1.0 and 2.0 (based on Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0), and more...
David believes that KM is about conversasion. It's the conversation that drives business to evolve. It's the conversation that make the topics more understandable. It's the conversation that make Knowledge Sharing possible. His pragmatic approach is then based on conversation. He had spent over 30 years developing software for collaboration. And the collaboration software is the heart of KM.
David mentioned that there are two forms of KM.
- Techno-Centric
- People-Centric
Techno-Oriented has to do with
- management of unstructured information
- Database search for context
People-Centric deals with personal KM with the following tools.
- Community of Practice (CoP)
- After Action review (AAR)
- Peer Assist
- Story Telling
- Knowledge Cafe'
- Opensources
With social tools people are allow to contact one another, to share knowledge, to exchange things, etc. Many tools for social exchanges for example, Blog, WiKi, Bookmarking & Tagging, Social Network Community, RSS, Podcast, Mashup (IBM term to combine portlets into a portal page).
The Knowledge Management facts.
- KM is everybody's job (not a corporate function).
- Knowledge is no longer controlled centrally. Ownership and control is distributed through the organization.
The social object is the topic of discussion. The social network is the collection of social objects.
KM is about understanding --> Making better decision --> Improve innovation
Understanding can be made through conversations.
Knowledge Cafe' is when a group of people get together to have an open, creative conversation, to share ideas & to gain new understanding of the issues.
