Library clips

Two of my posts have linked and quoted blog posts that are bringing to light the difference that the renewed push in KM brings, in a shift to a “work in progress” mentality.

I have mentioned several times that km 2.0 is a social way of doing work, it’s not a separate task, instead it’s blended in our work routine.

Firstly people are working this way on the open web, and they are also using social computing tools in the enterprise, these people are sometimes referred to as IT rogues.
The second difference is the fact that the new interest in KM (by early adopters), is being initiated by the workers…social productivity.
Whereas the first wave of KM was more a mandate by management, KM 2.0 is coming about by workers saying to management, “I’m really productive in a social way, it’s how I get things done, can we use these social computing tools”…and management would say, “Is this the new KM way to share tacit knowledge”, and the workers would say, “I’m not too sure what KM is, but I get things done by collaborating and connecting with my network.”

Anyway I want to once again point to the Transparent Office blog (this is becoming one of my favourites), Michael Idinopulos posts about the real essence of the new KM. It’s about thinking out loud, more open collaboration, your workings out are visible (less private). People get to share, engage and nuture, insights and works in early stages or in the thought stages…before all the cream is sorted, and formalised into a final product.

Perhaps KM 2.0 is like showing all the workings out of your maths solution…we get to see how you got there.
It’s this “how you got there” that we are trying to tease out, actually as you are sharing, others can help shape your path, and bring you to perhaps a better place…the social capital at work.
Also, others can read about the stages in your path, and utilise that know-how for a totally different work at hand, eg. an approach, experiences and insights a blogger shares about her workings towards a “engineering” deliverable, could very well be usable by an HR person.
A HR person is not going to read an “engineering” deliverable, but if they happened to come across a post (a fragment) about a research method the engineer discovered and applied in the “engineering” deliverable, the HR person may be able to use that info in their research task.

This is how Michael puts it:

“The real paradigm shift in Web 2.0, I believe, is the blurring the line between publication and collaboration. In the old days, people collaborated in private. They talked to their friends and colleagues, wrote letters. Later they sent emails. All the real thinking happened in those private conversations. Eventually, once the key insights had been extracted, refined, and clarified, they published: books, articles, speeches, blast memos, etc.”

“…the really exciting thing that’s happening in Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 is that more and more of those private “pre-publication” interactions are happening in public (or at least semi-public). I think of this as the dawn of the “Work in Progress” culture. We no longer think that something has to be finished before we let strangers into the conversation.”

In related knowledge worker practices, a post from Jeremy Thomas at the Social Glass blog, alludes to managers needing all the web 2.0 content data into a usable distilled format, as managers are about the “status” of work, in contrast to knowledge workers being about the “way they do” this work.

The Infovark blog explains this nicely:

“A lot of this E20 stuff is about transparency — improving employee awareness within the organization. Better visibility helps managers too — perhaps more than the average employee — but they’ll need a different set of tools to search and filter social content than “doers” will. The knowledge worker needs to find content so that they can do their work. A manager of knowledge workers needs to find out about the status of that work so they can measure progress and productivity.”

Maybe blogging can help here, a manager can subscribe to a team’s status blog rather than continuely needing meetings. They don’t need to wait for a formal report, or write down notes at a meeting, as blog posts can keep them informed…these blog posts enable the knowledge worker to capture stuff as it’s happening. When there is a meeting, the managers are already informed of what’s happening, this can be refined, and then most of the meeting can be spent on actions.
Better still a datablogging tool would be ideal…here are some examples.

What I like about web 2.0 is things like tag clouds where management can see the diversity, and depth of topics people are talking about…they can get a general picture of what’s going on.