McGee's Musings

Knowledge Management : Development and discussion around knowledge management and knowledge work

Updated: 9/7/2002; 3:45:03 PM.

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Sunday, August 25, 2002

Palmtops in the Operating Room. A Miami hospital is leading the way in using hand-held computers not only to replace the doctor's scrawl, but to share medical images with patients. By Ian Austen. [New York Times: Technology]
11:06:49 PM

Sharing time and expert knowledge management

Our meetings have not had any specific objectives in mind but were simply to have a conversation around the subject of KM and share thoughts, ideas and insights. This evening we kept coming back to creativity and the fact that so often in our organizational lives we try to control meetings to the extent that they are no longer creative. We talked about the fact that a lot of the real insights and decisions take place at the periphery of meetings - before they start, after they have finished, in the corridors or at the coffee machine.
We also discussed the fact that we had talked so much during the evening but had not captured any of it explicitly ... apart from my taking the odd note in a little red note book I always carry around with me ... how best do you capture the output of a creative conversation without destroying the spontaneity of the conversation itself. This blog is a poor attempt to do that a little later in the evening! So what else did we talk about ...

Bill Gates and the concept of [Bill Capital] ... the importance and effective use of key people's time in an organization - especially the creative ones ...
[The Mythical Man-Month]- the book by Fred Brooks of [IBM] and some of his insights into Project Management;project management ...
...
And I had what I at least thought was the great idea of modifying the traditional PDCA learning cycle of plan-do-check-act to PDBCA plan-do-blog-check-act []

[Gurteen Knowledge-Log]

Capturing a couple of interesting notions from David from a longer piece he wrote. The best stuff happens at the edges (maybe there's a link to Ray Ozzie's ideas in that respect?)

11:01:24 PM Google It!

On the naming of things (klogs as knowledge sharing notebooks)

Personal KM workshop in Singapore ... 18th September. Well it looks as if I am all set to run a 1-day [workshop] on [Personal Knowledge Management] (PKM) in [Singapore] for [Eventus] on 18th September.

I've run a similar workshop a number of time is the past with great success but this will be the first in which there will be a new module - that of "Personal Knowledge Publishing" or maybe "Tacit Knowledge Publishing" - in other words knowledge-logs or klogs.
Thank you [Matt Mower] for the terms. I tend to like the PKP variant as it fits in well with PKM.
I'm greatly looking forward to it and plan to take a few days holiday while I am there. I have been to Singapore just once in the past and love its vibrancy - not to mention Chinese food.
While I am there I also plan to do what I did when I ran a [workshop] in Australia:Sydney last year and that is to mail everyone who receives my knowledge-letter in Singapore and invite them for a drink one evening to network and discuss KM ... in Sydney we went on to have a meal and it was a great evening. [Gurteen Knowledge-Log]

There's been an interesting stream of discussion over the past week about finding a better term than klogs on the premise that "klog" is a bit short in the marketing pizazz department. Matt Mower started the discusion and Roland offered his insights. Now David here is adding his two cents (tuppence I suppose for David).

I've been mulling the issue over as well and I'm not as keen on the PKP or TKP notions put forth. To me "publishing" isn't the key issue, sharing is. I would suggest

Knowledge Sharing Notebooks

both to emphasize the sharing aspect and diminish the pyschological barrier the "publishing" raises.

The notion of Personal Knowledge Management that David raises is important, especially as a counter to the over-emphasis on corporate/organizational interests in KM.

Effective knowledge management isn't going to make much headway until we start paying attention to the ways that knowledge management and knowledge sharing matter to the success of individuals. If we can do that, then we can pick up the organizational benefits largely as a desirable side effect of PKM(Personal Knowledge Management). Klogs, whatever we end up calling them will be central to that strategy.

10:41:44 PM Google It!