Maybe ALL KM is Personal KM

Dave Pollard has posted a very thoughtful discussion of why KM has failed "those poor, abused, neglected, front-line workers who, a decade later, are still waiting for the realization of KM's extraordinary promise, and promises." He called it CONFESSIONS OF A CKO: WHAT I SHOULD HAVE DONE.

Describing the problem with the way KM has been viewed as an organizational level management issue, Dave confesses: "I realized that we have been looking at it all wrong, from above, from a systems perspective, instead of from ground level, from an activity level."

His proposed shift to focusing on the knowledge activities of individual knowledge workers leads to framing KM around the simple question of how do we make knowledge workers' "intellectual activities easier and more effective"?

Asking the question that way leads directly to personal KM. I've written on this a few times already, but recently added a couple of more links to resources (left column) and found a paper by Eric Tsui, Technologies for Personal and Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Knowledge Management, with a thorough review of what personal KM includes and the PKM technologies available as of 2002.

So, what do you think? Should we quit trying to impose "enterprise solutions" on what may inevitably be an individual knowledge worker problem?

Comments

[Brett]

Thomas,

The question as you pose it is very similar to much of the discussion concerning personal KM vs. enterprise KM: either one or the other. Personally, I see it as more of a synergistic relationship than a competitive one.

Instead of trying to impose an enterprise solution, I suggest encouraging and developing good individual knowledge worker KM practices (PKM, if you will) with an overall goal of achieving the enterprise solution.

Brett

[Tom Collins]

Brett,

It sounds like we're in agreement and I like your suggestion to avoid seeing this as a competition. As I hope has emerged from my recent posts (6/30, 7/5, & 7/11) and the model I'm working on, I look at PKM as extending beyond the individual in both directions. Effective PKM includes paying attention to where the "dots" come from and where they go after the individual "connects" them.

That means we have to build team collaboration tools and enterprise information systems (not to mention tools for connecting outside the enterprise, as well). My concern comes from the well-documented fact that vast resources have been poured into monolithic "enterprise solutions" without much work on making them accessible or usable by the individual knowledge worker.

My argument is not about either/or, but about focus and starting points.

I believe we must start with accepting the wide variation in work and learning styles. Then we must help the individual knowledge workers improve their own effectiveness, while designing organizational resources based on how those diverse individual knowledge workers will actually use them.

By the way, I enjoyed a quick skim through your "no straight lines" blog ( http://nsl.blogspot.com/ ) and am adding it to my list and my Bloglines feed. Your posts regarding intelligent organizations, "smart pull" technologies, and the KM relevance of "The Matrix" movies, caught my interest.