Sveiby Knowledge Management

Karl Erik Sveiby was one of the first people to take a systematic look at intellectual capital in organizations. He's a bit testy about the technology-centered hype around KM which he views as a predominantly U.S. phenomenon. His site here looks to be a pretty rich source of materials

10:19:35 PM •  • comment  

Lance Knobel: "Commonplace books arose in the renaissance as a means for learned men to record quotations or observations that seemed important to them." Thomas A. Stewart: "Reading my superiors' letters opened a window into how they conducted business with the world outside ... I learned who knew what, and that made me better at asking for advice." A smart man learns from his experiences. A wise man learns from the experiences of others. [Steven Vore: KM]

This is what I was looking for when I posted this the other day.  The problem was that I couldn't remember the term "commonplace" book. All I could remember was that I had seen it in a Radio weblog in the last few weeks.

I ended up searching a variety of logs and searching on different recollections of what I thought the term might be. Curious that I eventually stumbled on the same reference Lance used before I found my way back to the original post that started it all. Thank you, Steven and Lance

3:22:56 PM •  • comment  

Jim McGee: "Maybe the others who've been talking about this are already compulsively organized and can already locate anything they've worked on in the last two years with unerring accuracy." Hmm. Do concepts of Knowledge Management appeal more to already-organized people? We type-whatever A-retentive bozos seem to be more inclined to use something designed to organize even more, to share (show off?) what we know. When Jim says he's disorganized, does that mean that he "needs" KM any more or less? And if he does (and didn't realize or admit it), how could we - presumably more enlightened - convince him of it's benefits for him? He's right in thinking of WIIFM... I don't think we've "sold" one person on KM when talking of the ways it'll help their co-workers, the organization, the company or even the customers. [Steven Vore: KM]

One of the critical issues for KM that I haven't seen addressed is that so much of today's knowledge work is largely invisible. In the early days of the industrial revolution and on into much of modern industrial commerce, work was inherently visible. You had a bin of parts to draw from or you had a stack of paper to move from your in-box to your out-box. You managed work by looking at it. If you were sophisticated, you counted or measured what you were looking at and ended up with Taylor's Scientific Management or Deming's TQM. With knowledge work, you have to make it visible before you can do anything to manage it

There is a subtlety about the invisibility of knowledge work that is important here. The end results of knowledge work are often quite visible -- a book, a website, a new building. But so much of the work leading up to the end product is mental, by definition.

Certainly, we often use a variety of physical media as aids to our thinking - sketchpads, whiteboards, this computer. It is common practice, however, to treat these various aids as private and personal until the end product is complete and ready for display. This, by the way, is one of the reasons that the working notebooks of such thinkers as Leonardo Da Vinci are so highly prized. They provide us a window to study the thinking process of great minds.

While the PC has increased the productivity and quality of most kinds of knowledge work, it has done so largely at the expense of visibility. What used to be pages in a notebook that could be browsed, annotated, and shared are now changes in magnetic flux in the coating of a tiny spinning disk somewhere inside the machine. They are invisible both to their creator and anyone else without active effort on the part of the thinker. Worse, the audit trail of revisions, corrections, embellishments, and restructurings disappears completely, unless there is a conscious and systematic effort to create it.

What makes weblogs and k-logs so intriguing to me is that it offers a way out of this visibility problem without adding extra work or overhead. Granted there's an issue of developing a new style of working, which is no small task. But, at the end, you ought to be able to do the work and get the KM benefits as a side-effect. In time you may also end up doing better work for having that log as your visible workspace.

3:12:01 PM •  • comment