Value of KM Models

Thanks to Martin Roell over at Das E-Business Blog for his encouraging comments on my preliminary "End-to-End KM" model shown in my previous post. It was especially helpful to see how he displayed and compared my diagram with the very different, but related visualizations from Lilia Efimova and Dave Pollard.

Drawing pictures, sketches, diagrams helps me think through problems. As Martin suggested, I will be evolving the diagram over time. For example, I'm working on how to represent the surrounding environment, which so heavily influences (necessitates?) innovation, problem-solving, and decision-making behaviors, which in turn are the goals of KM. I'm currently playing with ideas from complex adaptive systems models (external stimuli/events), classic communications models ("noise"), Dave Snowden's Cynefin model (known, knowable, complex, and chaotic systems), among other ideas for envisioning the environment within which knowledge workers and organizations must perform knowledge work.

These concepts may be bound up in the notion of "information overload" for the individual knowledge worker and suggest a lot more work is needed on the "Collecting the Dots" end of my diagram and the problems of environmental scanning, awareness, and filtering. The allocation of our finite attention is involved here, too.

My other main interest, at the "Sharing" end, is in applying information design to communicate more effectively, both as part of the knowledge production process and as the end product of knowledge work. So I'll be spending time working on that part of the diagram, too.

I'd welcome any thoughts you might have on how the diagram can be improved, expanded, evolved, or on the general question of whether you find value in such attempts to visualize KM. Please feel free to comment here, post on your own blog and link back, or contact me directly by e-mail.