While still recovering from a rather intense day at work, yesterday, that is, where even cloning would not have helped me address multiple conflicts with the various meetings I had to attend throughout the day, I thought I would drop by again and share a few comments on a rather interesting interview I carried out through email, a little while ago (How ironic, eh? heh – although the first initial contact was through Twitter, heh but you know how it goes; there is a limit as to how much you can say in 140 characters …); with the always insightful Ana Neves around the topic of Knowledge Management and how it has been currently influenced by the emergence of Social Computing within the enterprise.
What a pleasure it was, to say the least! A true honour and a privilege, indeed, since the interview was made for the super fine KMOL online resource on Knowledge Management and Organisational Learning. We covered a good number of different questions and all of them pretty relevant to some of the work I have been doing myself for a while in the area of KM, Collaboration, Communities and Social Computing. Yes, certainly, I know, my sweet spots. We even talked a little bit about what it is like living a "A World Without Email". So, as you can see, I just couldn’t resist the offer to share my two cents on a good number of the topics I am passionate about.
Now, I am not going to reproduce the entire interview over here, but would certainly love to point you to it. There is an English and a Portuguese version of it and, instead, what I will do, as a teaser, of course, is share the questions we tried to address during the interview. That way it will give you an idea of what to expect. So here you have them:
- "There is a lot of theory around Organisational Knowledge Management and not much is shared about how it gets done. How is the Knowledge Management theory being translated inside organisations?
- In your view, what are the main challenges organisations face when investing on Knowledge Management?
- Are organisations currently more or less committed to KM?
- What are the KM “elements” that can help organisations the most during the current economic scenario?
- Some practitioners feel that organisations need the right culture in place before they can start a KM programme. Others defend that a KM programme can help create that “right” culture. Where do you stand?
- How is it to live and work in a world without email?
- Can organisations realistically aspire to release their staff from their inboxes?"
You may be wondering what I enjoyed the most out of the interview, right? Well, amongst several other things, the fact that Ana disagreed with some of my views, specially around the culture of sharing and whether it is a requirement or not for a successful deployment of a Knowledge Management programme. Fascinating, and very enjoyable, discussion that she has brought forward in a follow blog post under the title: "The Right Organisational Culture: A Requirement?"
And thus the debate is ON! Over the next couple of days I will be sharing my counter arguments hoping to keep adding further on into the discussion, but that would be the topic for another blog post. For now I leave you with Ana’s thought-provoking statement: "The Right Organisational Culture: A Requirement?"
What do you think? Is it a requirement? Is it not? Stay tuned for my follow up blog post on this very same topic …
(From here I just want to give a special thanks to Ana for her patience and support in hosting the email interview and for giving me the opportunity to share some further insights on a topic that I hope folks out there doing KM and Social Computing would be interested in reading & engaging with further … Thanks ever so much, Ana!)
Tags: Enterprise 2.0, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Computing, Social Media, Collaboration, Communities, Learning, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Remote Collaboration, Innovation, IBM, Networking, Social Networks, Conversations, Dialogue, Communication, Connections, Relationships, email, Productivity, Re-purposing Email, No-Email, Challenge Your Inbox, Progress Reports, Thinking Outside the Inbox, Information Overload, KMOL, Email Interviews, Interviews, A World Without Email, Organisational Learning, Ana Neves, Twitter, Culture of Sharing, Organisational Culture, Requirements
