Supporting enterprise knowledge management with weblogs: A weblog services roadmap by Michael Angeles though Jim Robertson is one of the most inspiring presentations I ever saw.
Indeed, weblogs have a very important role to play in the innovation process, and thus should be considered very seriously in corporate environments. Three reasons for this come to my mind after going through Michael’s presentation :
1. Most KM initiatives fail because of the lack of content. Managers talk "ad nauseam" about workflows and technology, assuming that content will take care of itself. Yet, how do you bring people to verbalize their thoughts and make them available to others ? The problem is has always been publication. How can you make that as close as possible to a conversation, which is far better to connect people than long structured articles. Hence this forgotten discipline that our fathers and grandfathers had of writing a diary. A diary benefits its writer because it helps him clarify his thoughts. It also benefits its reader because it can be a starting point for a very meaningful conversation, one I am confident that the writer will jump into. A weblog is really an incubator of shared ideas.
2. Technology is moving fastly into the hands of the individuals. It is is no longer in the hands of IT departments. Prices and costs have plummeted and superb collaboration tools, portals, content management systems are now becoming available to almost anyone. The time is coming when I won’t need my company to provide me with such tools. I will use my own the same way I am using my pen today. What I will need from my company however is a common information architecture so that the tools and applications I am using can interoperate with those of other employees, partners and clients. What I will need is a common language, grammar and document structure, and I will be ready to forego some of my personal freedom to benefit from the advantages of using corporate standards. It is time to understand that the corporate culture, the « way of doing things », is not so much materialized by software tools and workflows (« we have chosen SAP as our ERP system »), but rather by a shared meaning, language and rituals…. It’s about information architecture. To start with, it's about understanding the difference between data, content, information and documents.
3. Value is added to existing information through a process of aggregation, simplification and dissemination, which is exactly the concept underlying a web of blogs. In essence, the more decentralized, the richer information is; the more centalized, the more structured it is. Decentralizing for innovation, centralizing for reuse.
Very well stated. I've added your comments to the bottom of my blog entry for the presentation.
http://urlgreyhot.com/drupal/cil2004
-michael
Decentralizing for innovation, centralizing for reuse.
I am amazed. This is the core of KM. I can imagine the process of thought, as well as the universe expanding for diversity and collapsing for energy. (energy or material in the most reusable form).
That is a very powerful statement.
I will stop thinking about weblogs as online pubs and I really have to think twice or 100 times about the relation between expansion/collapse of information and innovation/diversity. I see the KM much more as a lively phenomenon than a static thing now.Knowledge beats; who could have seen it ?
Thanks martin.
Sebastien J.