Summary of #KMers Twitter chat April 13, 2010. For details, color, and to see who said what, see the full transcript.
Q1: What unproven/emerging idea would you like to implement for your KM initiative?
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Enterprise 2.0 tools: Talk Amongst Yourselves (Using social tools, of course…) See article http://aboveandbeyondkm.com/2010/04/talk-amongst-yourselves.html
- Take McAfee’s advice and stop obsessing about risks for social media and take more advantage of the benefits. (reference to Andrew McAfee of Harvard Business school http://andrewmcafee.org/blog)
- Shift knowledge workers away from monolithic documents to more granular sharing of knowledge chunks (like wikis, social bookmarking and tagging to build a fact base, forums, microblogging)
- Allow alumni and retirees to continue to belong to communities of practice inside the firewall. Don’t cut off their access. Allow alums to continue to contribute as long as they are willing and able. Extend KM system to participants who aren’t employees
- Huge challenge for HR systems
- Perhaps every piece of content surface in community software should have it own access permissions.
- Create an environment that cultivates innovation
- Video to share knowledge. Will get easier and easier to record a quick video. We will be able to search into video text
- Engage in any useful KM practices instead of searching for the “best” practice
- Simple Q&A, simple FAQs, develop small packets of information – infobits or infobytes, mobile knowledge, more crossovers.
- Allow knowledge workers to be people, human again; empower them to co-share responsibility w/ their knowledge work
- Make it easier for people to work with others outside their project – cultural, financial, billable hours, behaviors, …
- Creatively overcome the “I don’t have time for that” obstacle to spending time sharing and reusing knowledge
- Use prediction markets and crowdsourced data for development projects and disaster relief
- PredMkt not more popular because not integrated with existing work
- Non statistical element of the results as opposed to quantitative studies is a big hurdle, + accepting chg + contd
- Tne challenge to prediction markets is that intuitively many managers don’t trust them
- I think idea that lots of amateurs know more than a few experts is real challenge to prediction markets & soc. media alike
- I am sold on Prediction Markets…InfoServ, Crowdcast, the Iowa Electronic Market and ollywood Stock Xchange etc.
Q2: What are early adopters doing today that will be mainstream in within the KM community in < 5 years?
- Video, mobility, connections to external networks; video from end users, idea sourcing/ranking commonplace
- Getting around the control paradigm. Need to find a way to move forward without so many constraints. New funding models
- Using multiple data points/ criteria to determine the value of content, aggregating score.
- Opening up conversations, allow for open knowledge sharing, organise work around networks / communities, releasing control …
- Agent design — ontologies and processes for design agents running against a semantic mensh
- More helper applications – although MS paperclip failed – before its time? Example, I am working on a strategy doc – get access to template, sample doc, and a couple of videos that outline key points I need to address first with person 2 ask
- Effective ways to deal with attention management will likely gain wide adoption
- Much more collaboration beyond the corporate walls. Much less rigid idea of corporation in 5 years
- Mobile access knowledge sharing will become mainstream in 5 or so years, and use of twitter like apps for rapid sharing
- More interesting assignments with passionate people focused on doing real good. Tools to help me find and connect better with others.
- Treating learning & KM initiatives as a continuum, rather than disjointed efforts.
- Interaction models based on gaming, particularly MMPRPGs will become more prominent
- Tie in analytics for both structured and unstructured data with KM practices to get better decision making – even automated
- Continuation from Q1 – predication markets in/out of fw, #SM, portable knowledge, video, translation assistance, simple Q&A
Q3: Which tech advances will impact KM significantly, or are we at the point of incremental gains/diminishing returns of ROI? In other words, does the tech shift need to swing back to the people/process portion of managing KM?
- Increasing bandwidth will allow more media to be shared more easily
- Mobile access (including improved bandwidth – but also innovations in KM for low bandwidth environments)
- More prevalent mobile will allow capture of knowledge at all times rather than just reflection when back to desk
- Various forms of AI becoming practical due to increased computational power – led by machine learning advances
- Enterprise social software. Provides much better tools for both formal and informal knowledge sharing. It’s not about specific e20 tools; they are functionally similar. More about the way of working that tools enable.
- tools will be useless unless company culture adapts accordingly with the new dictates of the social web
- culture never changes too fast, but we are going to see dramatic shift in corp culture over next 10 yrs.
- when organizations don’t change, people adopt new technologies/techniques for their work anyway – thus forcing change
- corp culture will have no choice but to change – it is more natural to be social
- It may take time for the culture to change but the work is already evolving. The control structure may require a new generation.
- Would like to know if certain orgs are better suited (eg zappos, WF)
- One participants previous blog on the topic of corporations adopting e2.0 tools: http://ow.ly/1xXaZ
- Microsoft Pivot (et al) will put multidimensional analysis in users hands, providing a new palette for navigation and interaction
- Already shifted strongly away from documents, towards people. We need a midpoint that incorporates process as well.
- New services will rise with the advent of greater collaboration and more knowledge exchanges.
- How about “Remote Expert”? Sort of like remote control of a desktop, calling in the expert in real-time & they take over?
- LOTS of startups working on the concept of bringing in virtual experts. Will see a whole lot of that soon.
- We will be able to build our own KM system from open source components that allows personal, organizational knowledge to become one.
- More virtual teams will require much better online collaboration tools.
- real time translation from text to audio & vice-versa, real-time videos ala ustream – prediction markets combined with peering
- We will start asking different questions than we do today.
- Intelligent activity streams inside the firewall
- Technology that allows knowledge markets to be created with ease will accelerate knowledge economy
Q4: to wrap things up, what do you like/dislike and why? “Best”, “Next”, “Useful”, “Proven”, or “Good” practices?
- I like best AND next. We have our best practice (as of the moment) and the next practice (the innovation)
- Client service orgs like to use “best” because that’s what their clients are looking for. How to handle disconnect?
- I usually lean toward good or recommended practices, but avoid “best” since that seems very know-it-all-ish.
- Dislike “best” big time; could well do with all of the others, perhaps leaving out “proven”; misses context (Just like best)
- I like next (future, hopeful, improved). Best is an excuse to be mediocre. Useful, proven, good all indicate a personal judgement
- I prefer “Next” b/c it encapsulates WIP, and is not the laggard that “Best Practices” tends to be these days.
- For me “next practices” has a different meaning from “good practices” and both have their place
- I’d have to go for “Good” or “Useful” practices. If not useful then what is the use
- “Good” practices for me or “Next practices” there is no such thing as “best practice” in contextual setting
- I like qualitative “Good” or “Useful”. “Next” doesn’t seem appropriate. Are they practices no one is using yet?
- I like the idea of allowing users to tag content such as proven practices with “I reused this” to suggest to others
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Participants:
Matt Haggerty from Chicago – Moderator
Lee Romero from Deloitte in Detroit
Mark Neff, CSC, in Evans, GA
Stan Garfield, community evangelist, Deloitte.
Jen MacIntosh, Ottawa, ON. KM practitioner for over 10years, focused on web-self service.
Curtis Conley. Collaboration analyst at Deloitte.
Jim McGee ex-CKO, still consult re KM
Theresa Sullivan, 8 yrs KM at Bain Boston
Luis Suarez, Gran Canaria, KMer, CommunityBuilder & Social Computing Evangelist @ IBM
Ian Thorpe, working on Knowledge Management in UNICEF
Larry Hawes, KM and collaboration analyst for past dozen years.
Jeff Hester from Fluor in So Cal.
Rob Swanwick.