E L S U A ~ A KM Blog Thinking Outside The Inbox by Luis Suarez

Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) – An Update

After the weblog post I shared a couple of days ago on Social Networks – Knowledge Management Done Right I thought you might be interested in another post around the same subject (Personal Knowledge Management) that Dave Pollard (Author as well of Why Knowledge Management Is So Important) shared yesterday: Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) – An Update.

This is, yet again, another superb weblog post that will certainly provide you with some good insights about that relatively new Knowledge Management approach where knowledge is shared locally and there is a much more profound commitment from the knowledge worker to produce some more quality materials than ever before and share it with their peers. However, with all that said I thought about including a couple of interesting, and thought provoking, quotes from Dave’s weblog post:

“The old model, which we pursued from 1994-2004, is focused on content and collection — the acquisition, organization & aggregation, storage and dissemination of content under organization-wide taxonomies using customized tools and containers, just-in-case it might be reusable. The new PKM model, which we believe will replace it, is focused on context and connection — connecting to the right people just-in-time, canvassing them to gain their knowledge and advice in the context of a particular business problem or pursuit, synthesizing that knowledge and applying it to the issue at hand [...]“

Indeed, I couldn’t have agreed more with that particular quote and that is why I have always felt very strong about how crucial the role of communities (whether they are physical or virtual communities) will become over time when people start realising that they can get to share so much more knowledge within a community than just as an individual. To start with it will make things easier to establish those connections that Dave mentions and in most cases in almost real-time, regardless of how disperse the community members may be. With the current set of collaboration tools out there it has never been easier sharing and managing content in a community space by allowing each of the community members to take ownership of their own contributions and conversations.

“[…] KM as a means of improving productivity, capitalizing on the best available knowledge and experience, tapping the collective wisdom of employees and customers, facilitating more robust collaboration, improving the quality of decisions and enhancing agility and innovation […]“

That collective wisdom certainly would be the one from the communities that the knowledge workers may belong to and as such you can already see how those communities would be the invigorating organisms that will foster collaboration to share knowledge and to learn from one another. Yes, indeed, a successful Personal Knowledge Management approach will have to be based on the key role played by communities where community members may find their own individual space to collaborate but at the same time still feel part of the larger entity.

Further on in Dave’s weblog post you will be able to read with much more detail how he describes the key four different components that PKM is made of. So you may want to have a look and read further on those:

• Know-How Canvassing & Connection
• Know-How Harvesting
• Personal Content Management
• Personal Productivity Improvement

And after finishing off that reading you will probably understand now why this relatively new wave of tools for collaboration in the enterprise, like Weblogs, Wikis, IM, VoIP, Web presence, Flickr, etc. are grabbing a stronger focus by the day. People are starting to realise that sharing knowledge with others and learning from one another is a personal and a more localised exercise than ever before, and the fact that there are both individual and community tools put together out there that certainly help effortlessly to promote that new approach to KM could make it all work out just fine. Just fine !

Technorati Tags : Personal Knowledge Management, PKM, KM, Communities, Collaboration, Social Networking

The Temptations of Qumana

Some time ago I mentioned in another weblog post how for as long as I have been weblogging both in my Intranet and my Internet weblogs I have been using w.bloggar as my main weblogging tool. However, even though I have enjoyed the experience quite a lot so far, I am finding out that ever since I started to share content on a regular basis here in elsua I am continuing to use Qumana more and more. And I have been enjoying the experience so much as well that I almost exclusively use Qumana to post content into my weblogs.

And now, more than ever, with the newer version of the software, which can be downloaded from here, I have reached the point where I think I may not go back ! It is so easy to share content across the board. Actually, too easy. Just this morning I posted something similar along these lines in my Intranet weblog and we have been having some interesting discussions. The actual subject of the conversation is based on a popular feature from Qumana: the fact that with a single click it allows you to post the same content in multiple weblogs without having to re-write it.

That is just one of the many favourite features from this particular piece of software but I have been wondering if it would actually be a good practice to share the same content in multiple places, i.e. multiple weblogs. More than once I have been tempted to actually share a weblog post or two written over here into my Intranet weblog and vice versa. Yet almost every time I fail thinking that it may not be fair to either audience since it might give the impression that I am just trying to repeat myself.

However, and with all that said, I can also agree to the point of view where sometimes there are some of those great weblog posts you come across that you think that the more exposure you can give them, the better. And that is why cross-posting would make sense. However, at what costs ? Will your weblogs readership go down, or quite the opposite, will it go up thinking that you have tried to inter-connect two particular weblogs through a number of interesting weblog posts and therefore want to establish a strong connection between both readerships?

I have tried to look for some references out there in the Blogosphere, but so far I haven’t been able to find one that would convince me enough to form an opinion, so if you are out there reading this weblog post, what do you do when you have multiple weblogs and you get to write stuff for each of them? Do you actually do some cross-posting and try to reword the weblog post again to match different audiences? Or you just leave it as is and share it anyway. What do you think ?

Technorati Tags : Metablogging, Qumana, wbloggar