Preparing
for Conversations with David Gurteen
IPKM: Inter-Personal
Knowledge Management
David Gurteen
Knowledge
Networker, Gurteen Knowledge
 Biography
David Gurteen has
over 30 years' experience working in high technology industries
and has worked as an independent consultant for the last decade.
He is best described as a 'knowledge networker' who helps people
in organizations, in all walks of life, to be more creative and
innovative and to work more effectively with  each other
to make their collective knowledge productive.
David is the publisher
of the Gurteen
Knowledge Website, a free resource website of over 3,500
pages that contains book reviews, articles, people profiles,
an event calendar, inspirational quotations, an integral knowledge-log
and more on subjects that include, knowledge management, learning,
creativity, innovation and personal mastery. An avid writer,
his most recent article was on "Knowledge, Awareness and
Understanding" and was published in the September 2003 KMPro
newsletter.
He is the founder
of the Gurteen Knowledge Community - a network of over
10,000 people in 125 countries that is growing by over 500 people
each month. The purpose of the community is to help its members
achieve their full potential by connecting them with like-minded
people, new ideas, and alternative ways of working. Members receive
the free monthly Gurteen Knowledge-Letter that is now in its
third year. The newsletter is also distributed to members of
the Henley Knowledge Management Forum.
He runs his own
regular knowledge cafés in London and often facilitates
knowledge cafés for other organizations. He also recently
ran a knowledge management conference in London that was acclaimed
by delegates for the sense of "community" that it built.
He has several other conferences, events and workshops planned
for the near future.
David began his
career as a professional software development manager and in
the late 80s worked for Lotus Development as "International
Czar" where he was responsible for ensuring that Lotus products
were designed for the global marketplace.
A frequent speaker
and facilitator who regularly presents on various aspects of
knowledge management and learning, David's recent presentations
include a talk for the Singapore Association for Continuing Education
on "Knowledge Management and Creativity" in Singapore;
a workshop at KM Asia 2003 in Singapore and the facilitation
of a knowledge café at KM Europe in Amsterdam.
He has recently
become noted for his focus on Personal Knowledge Management (PKM),
and his beginning thread for this STAR Series discussion is Inter-Personal
Knowledge Management.
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Opening
Thoughts: Defining IPKM
Most people equate
PKM to PIM (Personal Information Management). They talk about
it in terms of personal competences and as being able to do such
things as use a search engine effectively and handle e-mail overload.
They think in terms of personal tools.
Here are some links
that I have come up with by googling "personal knowledge
management:"
You will find that
most of them take this PIM approach or have a strong leaning
that way. Even my definition of PKM could be interpreted as a
PIM type approach though it was not meant to convey that when
I wrote it some time ago.
Like KM, the term
PKM has been 'hijacked' to equate to technology and tools!!
Denham Gray in his weblog recently posted his thoughts
on PKM (read PIM!).
I utterly totally
agree with him . . .
If PKM is seen as
the organization of personal information then, like Denham, I
can't get very excited about it . . . it is useful but is a limited
way and does not have a lot to do with what I think of as "knowledge
management" and "learning."
EKM (Enterprise
Knowledge Management) initiatives focused on technology. Driven
by senior management or a CKO this approach, by and large, has
failed to deliver on its promise mainly because it has failed
to gain the buy-in of the individual knowledge workers in their
organizations or the knowledge workers have failed to see the
value in sharing or working together or just don't know how.
Denham in his weblog
says :
PKM to me is a paradox
-- knowledge in my world is socially constructed -- it is not
about organizing your thoughts, learning to use tools or developing
individual competences -- it is about dialog, community and collaboration.
I agree! This is
at the heart of things.
So I think we should
drop the term PKM and come up with a new term . . . a term that
captures what KM is about . . . not PKM, not ERM. For now I will
call it IPKM (inter-personal knowledge management). I'm not too
sure I like that term either but it will do as a "handle"
for now. I don't really care what we call it as long as in Denham's
words "it is about dialog, community and collaboration."
Lilia Efimova seems
to have been struggling to come up with a new term too.
So what I would
like to discuss in this STAR Dialogue?
What is this IPKM
stuff? What differentiates it from EKM and PKM? How do we make
it happen, and what should we call it ?
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