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Preparing
for Conversations with Dave Pollard
Weblogs and
Other Social Software for Knowledge Work
Dave Pollard
Consultant
Meeting of Minds and blogger, "How to Save the World"
 Biography
Dave Pollard was
Chief Knowledge Officer for Ernst & Young in Canada from
1994 until recently, following twenty years as an Entrepreneurial
Services practitioner. He left E&W, citing differences in
philosophies on knowledge management. He has now established
his own consultancy, Meeting of Minds, and continues his highly
regarded blog, "How to Save the World."
At E&Y Dave
had responsibility in Canada and Latin America for:
- Developing the
firm's knowledge strategy and vision,
- Design and deployment
of knowledge architecture, tools and content,
- Management of research,
analysis, navigation, and specialist network services, and
- The attainment
of a knowledge-sharing culture in the firm.
He was the Global
Director of Innovation and Content Management in E&Y's Global
CBK (Centre for Business Knowledge), a virtual knowledge organization
serving 80,000 practitioners worldwide and employing the firm's
business researchers, analysts, database and network coordinators
in ten countries and managing the firm's knowledge infrastructure,
Intranet, and Extranet.
Dave chaired firm
committees and focus groups on the virtual workplace, Web strategy,
and business innovation. He also served as a Core Member of the
firm's Innovation Team, where he designed the firm's Idea
eXchange Innovation Management System. He is a subject matter
specialist on knowledge management, business innovation, the
virtual workplace and the future of business, and has written
and lectured extensively on these topics. He lives in the Caledon
Hills near Toronto, and has worked for fifteen years without
a permanent office or administrative assistant. An active environmentalist,
Dave's hobbies include genealogy, writing short stories and composing
music.
Recently Dave's
work has been published in several books and magazines, and his
weblog is ranked #5 in Canada and has been nominated for several
awards.
Dave recently announced
his decision to leave E&Y to set up Meeting of Minds which
offers social networking (SN) applications, content management
and personal productivity advisory services, and The Caring Enterprise
Coach, which helps entrepreneurs establish and operate new collaborative
enterprises.
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Opening
Remarks
I'm delighted to
have the opportunity to host a discussion with such a distinguished
group of knowledge management professionals. My strong feelings
of frustration and lack of progress caused me to decide to leave
Ernst & Young last December after 27 years, the final 10
of which were as Canadian CKO and Global Director of Knowledge
Innovation. Those of you who have read my weblog posts on KM know that I'm something
of a pessimist on the current state of KM, and I have struggled
for much of the last five years to get E&Y to stop resting
on its tarnished laurels (it fell off the MAKE award list
for the first time last year) and move ahead in some new and
exciting directions, most notably:
- the use of weblogs
and other personal content management tools to share, organize
and publish knowledge, and
- the development
of Social Networking Applications (voted Technology of the Year
by Business 2.0 magazine) to broaden and deepen connectivity
and person-to-person knowledge transfer
The following table
summarizes the advantage I see in these new technologies, and
reflects my view that Social Networking and Personal Content
Management are critical components of the future evolution of
KM.
| |
Knowledge
Management |
Social Networking / Personal
Content Management (PCM) |
Knowledge
Creation
Strategy |
Submit what
you know |
Publish your 'filing cabinet' |
| Knowledge Use Strategy |
Re-use: Find & tailor
appropriate knowledge from central repositories
|
Qualify & Proxy: Use
individuals' knowledge to qualify them as
appropriate experts to converse with, and as a surrogate for
that
individual when they are not available for conversation
|
| Where Knowledge Resides |
Large, centralized repositories |
Decentralized, in PCM system
on laptop (mostly) |
| Key Knowledge Tools |
Search engines, Community
of Practice and collaboration tools
|
Expertise finder, Connector
tool, Network Builder tool, Super Address Book, PCM content Publishing
& Subscription tool, Simple
Virtual Presence tool
|
| Critical Connection |
People-to-knowledge |
People-to-people |
As I've been discussing
with you during David Gurteen's STAR turn, I think the right
column above is consistent with David's vision for what he calls
Personal (or Interpersonal) Knowledge Management -- PKM/IPKM.
The significant difference is that, unlike David, I'm jaundiced
about the possibility of changing knowledge culture, processes
or behaviours in large organizations. Therefore, I believe the
evolution from KM to PKM will occur bottom-up, virally, and only
if and when software developers provide, at little or no cost,
a suite of simple, intuitive Social Networking and Personal Content
Management tools, which will allow any individual knowledge
worker to effectively connect to anyone else, inside or outside
their organization. At that point what Jerry calls Corporate
Knowledge Management will, I believe, largely disappear (and
few, I fear, will mourn its loss).
You may have seen
or used some of the first-generation Social Networking tools:
LinkedIn, Ryze, Orkut etc. If you have, you are probably justifiably
disappointed in how little of the promise of these tools has
been realized. I have recently developed a blueprint for the development
of a sounder architecture for Social Networking, that entails
three 'levels' of tools:
- Personal Content
Management (PCM) tools:
to collect, organize and facilitate better use of the knowledge
that resides on everyone's desktop, and set "permissions"
for others' access to the individual's content
- Metadata tools: to automatically "translate"
and reorganize the knowledge in the PCM tools into a format useful
for other users (friends, networks, associates, customers, suppliers
etc.)
- Network &
connectivity tools:
to find experts and people with common interests, connect to
them and to people in the individual's networks simply, using
various multimedia tools, and to "publish" one's personal
knowledge and subscribe to others' knowledge
A key attribute
of these tools is simplicity, so they function intuitively and
need little or no user training. Another key is that every individual
maintains control of their own knowledge, organized as they want.
The metadata tools do the "heavy lifting," so there
is no need to rework or submit information. The network and connectivity
tools maintain no content themselves, but go out and harvest
it through the permissioned metadata from individuals' hard drives.
A schematic of how these tools would fit together
and a detailed example of how they would work in practice can
be found at my blog.
The potential implications
of this for 'traditional' knowledge management are, I think,
immense. Is a corporate Intranet needed at all when peer-to-peer
sharing is so easy and powerful, and allows you to share across
organizational boundaries, not just within them? Why has so little
of the promise of collaboration, explicit knowledge capture,
leveraging 'best practices' and communities of practice been
realized, and does Social Networking & PCM give up on this
promise too easily? And with such free and broad flow of knowledge,
what about the 'competitive advantage' of knowledge, and what
about information security, and the importance of trust?
I'd be pleased to
use this forum to provide further information on some of the
newly-developed prototypes that have some of the functionality
of the tools described above, and to act as an intermediary between
you (as potential power users) and the developers of these prototype
tools. However, I'm hoping to have a free-wheeling discussion
with you about where KM is going, because I sincerely believe
it's "change or die" time for our profession. I'll
be surprised if, at the end of our journey together, we haven't
all changed our ideas about the value, and future, of knowledge
management.
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Additional
Reading
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