Weekly Knowledge Management Blog by Stan Garfield

KM Question, Blog, Link, and Book of the Week

[KM Home Page - Implementing a successful KM programme - Send a Question]

KM Question of the Week

Q: What is personal knowledge management? How can individuals manage their own knowledge?

A: To manage your personal knowledge, whenever you learn something new – or search for, receive, or come across potentially useful information – ask yourself these questions:

1. Who to contact to get and give help? Build your social network, actively use it, and don't be afraid to contact someone to ask a question or share useful information.
2. What can and should be done with information? Think about information, and ask how can you use it now, who else might be interested in it, and if it might be useful in the future.
3. When to share information and with whom? Use email, threaded discussions, blogs, and wikis to share what you know and think, ask questions and solicit help, and build credibility and a good reputation.
4. Where to store information so it can be found, and where to find it? File, tag, organize, and search effectively so that information can be readily retrieved.
5. Why information is and can be useful? Ponder, analyze, make sense, learn, and innovate.
6. How to find information when needed, and how to use it? Develop strategies for searching, browsing, navigating, asking, discovering, and using information.

Professor Paul Dorsey and colleagues at Millikin University defined seven Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) skills:

1. Retrieving Information
2. Evaluating Information
3. Organizing Information
4. Collaborating Around Information
5. Analyzing Information
6. Presenting Information
7. Securing Information

In Thinking for a Living Tom Davenport addresses many topics related to PKM. In Chapter 6 ("Developing Individual Knowledge Worker Capabilities"), he lists ten common attributes of individuals who are highly effective in managing their own personal information environments:

1. they avoided gadgets
2. limited the number of separate devices
3. invested effort in organizing information
4. weren't missionaries
5. got help
6. used assistants – to some degree
7. weren't doctrinaire about paper versus electronic approaches
8. decided what information was important to them, and organized it particularly well
9. use lists
10. adapt the use of tools and approaches to the work situation at a given time.

For more information on personal knowledge management, see:

• Your say: Personal knowledge management by Sandra Higgison
• Personal KM Q&A by Lilia Efimova
• Connecting Personal KM to Innovation by Thomas Collins
• Personal Knowledge Management and Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) -- an Update by Dave Pollard
• Personal toolkit: A framework for personal knowledge management tools by Steve Barth
• PKM Topic by David Gurteen

KM Blog of the Week

KnowledgeForward by Craig Roth

The KM Business Case: Assessing the situation

Some questions to ask to assess the situation before diving into the business case:

• Why me?
• Business Case vs. Business Plan
• Business case vs. ROI
• ROI, NPV, IRR, payback, TTV
• Conceptual vs. Concrete
• Project vs. infrastructure
• Hard vs. soft
• Net benefit vs. status quo
• Prioritization vs. financial testing
• Lottery vs. followup

KM Link of the Week

KM, culture and compromise: interventions to promote knowledge sharing supported by technology in corporate environments

by Hazel Hall, School of Computing, Napier University, Edinburgh, UK and Melanie Goody, KPMG LLP, London, UK

Journal of Information Science, Vol. 33, No. 2, 181-188 (2007)

The theme of knowledge sharing is discussed extensively in the knowledge management literature. Such work tends to focus on the barriers that impede knowledge sharing activity. Of these ‘culture’ is commonly cited as a major obstacle. This article examines what is meant by the term ‘culture’. In the context of efforts to promote good practice in knowledge management, it is argued that straightforward reference to culture as a barrier to knowledge sharing is inadequate. Rather, firms should be looking at power issues and, in particular, organizational politics to explain success and failure in attempts to motivate knowledge sharing. The domain of sociotechnical studies is considered as a means of unpicking cultural issues at work in specific environments through the deployment of actor-network theory to identify shifting organizational power relationships.

• KM, culture and compromise: Document summarizes the main points covered by Hazel Hall in a conference breakout session
• KM, culture & compromise: Presentation

KM Book of the Week

KM Books Wiki created by Matt Moore

This is a wiki page for annotating and discussing your favorite books related to Knowledge Management.

Experimenting with the Listables service that allows ranking. Please join and make your knowledge vote count!

Recommended Books

1. Working Knowledge
2. Deep Smarts
3. Communities of Practice
4. Enabling Knowledge Creation
5. Learning to Fly
6. The Hidden Power of Social Networks
7. Leading Strategic Change
8. Harvard Business Review on Knowledge Management
9. The Fifth Discipline
10. Cultivating Communities of Practice
11. The Innovator's Dilemma
12. The Innovator's Solution

Other Lists

1. Denham's 5 KM books to pitch
2. Gurteen KM Book List
3. Wikipedia KM Entry: Further Reading
4. Best 10 Readings in KM
5. Stan Garfield's KM Book List
6. Verna Allee: Recommended Books

-END-

[The contents of this KM blog are my personal comments and do not reflect the official views of Hewlett-Packard Company.]