After a discussion with a friend (a Director of Projects for a large website), I was pondering the state of Knowledge Management and its intersection with the nebulous term “Web 2.0″. [Sad short-hand this phrase - because a wiki is not a blog, nor does it have "friends" but I digress... Note to self: write a post on the un-specificity of the term Web 2.0]
This is a subject near and dear to my frontal lobe because I abhor remembering things that do not bring me joy and well being. For a vague example, what did we decide to set as the discount for customer’s of type X? Or, what was the conclusion of our research into market Y?
And so, as in most corporations, I will email the AHSME (ad hoc subject matter expert) and act on the reply, and possibly file it into an email folder (albeit a different one from the last time I needed that data). [This cycle makes me feel dumb and it costs my company money.]
In this article from 2006, now perhaps out of date, Mr. Carr weights his discussion on people’s behavior. And rightfully so. As so aptly put by one of the comments on the post “You can’t run a library without librarians.” But his article, as is the best of le Web deuxieme, is actually a review of an article by Andrew McAfee of the Harvard Business School.
And in a follow up to Carr’s review, McAfee writes of business leaders, “If they can convince their organizations that using and contributing to
the internal collabosphere is part of the fabric, identity, and life of
the company, some interesting things will happen.”
Like what exactly? I suspect that the 24-30 year-olds will be ROTFL about the Sr. VP’s exhortation that “We’re hip! We blog!” You can’t legislate the organic!
But you can try this… (free and unsolicited advice coming up)
- Ban Microsoft Office from the desktop! – Reports are done in blog, plans are done in wiki or other collaboration (e.g., Sharepoint) space.
- Ban internal email – Back to collaboration space (where I query a colleague within a product, project or customer context)
- Add Librarians – Hey India, Brasil, Kenya great opportunity for outsourced taxonomy admins now developing.
- Abolish the IT department – Create an Agile Productivity Coaching team that roams and helps you create or update your dashboard and perhaps brings a camera to capture your (report, plan, idea, demo, training module)
Disclaimer: I am not a Knowledge Worker… but I play one on the Internet.