At our first ever SIKM-Boston face to face meeting in Feb I had the opportunity to meet Bill Ives. The conversation around the table turned to ‘how do you write your blog posts?’. The answers from around the table:
From there the conversation went to ‘Well how do you keep track of information?’. the replies (greatly simplified):
So here we have a diverse group of KMers who each have individual methods to capture, share and reuse the information they come across. My point is that KM is always focused on ‘how can we take all of this information’ and then get it into the heads of our employees. The reality is we spend little time on helping our employees manage their information.
In the corporate world we get inundated with information through email, phone calls, F2F meetings, company town halls, more email, RSS feeds from blogs, wikis, Word docs, Powerpoint files, still more email, texting, IMing, Yammering, Twittering, Skyping, conference calls, Webex-es, webinars, Podcasts, Videocasts, and on it goes as technology marches on. Just like the ‘last mile’ is often neglected, the ‘last foot’ between the employee and computer is also neglected and overlooked. In building KM systems, processes and embedding those into business processes, yet not taking into account the diversity of information, information sources and tools to manage and consume the information we end up hurting the employee rather than helping.
I am curious if any of you have focused on helping employees to become better consumers and producers of information as part of your KM program.
