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SIIA Brown Bag: Personal Knowledge
Management Empowers Today's User-Publishers |
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25 April 2006 |
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The recent SIIA Brown Bag Lunch Series panel on personal
knowledge management highlighted tools from leading
suppliers that support collaborative publishing by
individuals in and beyond major enterprises who create
collective knowledge quickly and easily. Be it wikis,
weblogs, messaging systems or new forms of publishing
personal knowledge management has taken content into new
enterprise environments that attract people who want to
share information effectively for profit with the ease that
people doing it for fun on the Web enjoy. When anyone from
any enterprise could be a part of this collaborative
publishing environment it's time for publishers to examine
more closely how their content can be central to these
highly productive user/publishers. |
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What is
personal knowledge management and why should you care?
Well, if you had come to the
SIIA Brown Bag Lunch Series panel that I moderated at the
McGraw-Hill building last week you'd already know that
individuals in collaborative environments are using today's
highly flexible and affordable user-oriented publishing
technologies to share collective and personal insights far more
efficiently than ever before with their peers and colleagues.
Personal knowledge management tools such as weblogs, wikis and
online messaging systems are creating easily accessed knowledge
on the fly with simple features and rapidly implemented
structure to get communities of peers surfacing answers and
collective insights for critical issues. It a trend that's
changing enterprise publishing as much as it's changed the Web
as we know it today.
While personal knowledge management tools are now familiar
to many Web surfers, these tools take on a whole new light when
they are applied to the needs of major enterprises and their
clients and suppliers - and present new challenges for
commercial publishers trying to get their content into the
right contexts in today's business environment. Many publishers
and aggregators focus on devising big-ticket workflow solutions
for enterprises that use technology-intensive tools to put
their premium content in the most valuable context. But
personal knowledge management tools allow users to devise their
own workflow solutions on an as-needed basis - solutions that
may come together long before a publisher or aggregator has
been able to engineer their value equation into the user-driven
publishing mix.
As demonstrated by the panelists for this session personal
knowledge management is really about eliminating the I.T.
gibberish that hangs up so many collaborative efforts and
getting to the important thing: people most in the know on key
topics communicating effectively with peers through publishing
tools that eliminate technical complexity and provide a great
deal of flexibility.
- For Bob Serr, CTO of
Parlano,
personal knowledge management means using enterprise-ready
group messaging to get both teams and entire enterprises in
on critical live and well-archived online conversations that
can move both small teams and entire organizations in the
right direction for critical functions such as big deals with
clients and disaster recovery efforts. In a world in which
human conversations still drive most business decisions,
being able to use conversations as they key to knowledge
building is fundamental.
- For Matthew Mahoney of
Socialtext, it means using
wikis
as a core tool that uses and feeds content from emails, RSS
feeds, mobile devices to move from little personal islands of
content to an environment in which people can collaborate to
link together key content and insights in the most efficient
manner possible. From each person's small contributions
develops a powerful sum far greater than the parts that can
leverage both new and existing publishing tools and display
environments.
- For Greg Lloyd, President and Founder of
Traction Software, personal knowledge management
means using weblog publishing tools that provide inline text
commenting to attract contextualized conversations on
critical topics and to allow teams to categorize, filter,
personalize and permission views of this collaborative
content. These spaces provide the ability for build
"bottom-up" knowledge systems within and beyond the
increasingly permeable boundaries of major organizations.
- For Ben Elowitz, CEO of
Wetpaint.com, it's all about the content and
developing tools that make it as easy as possible for people
contributing to personal knowledge management systems to
want to adopt them as their own and to develop dialogs
with other contributors. Wetpaint takes wiki-like tools and
boils them down to very friendly and familiar interfaces that
users on the Web and in enterprises can use to add their
voices to key topics in a way that makes collaborative
publishing both intuitive and fun.
These personal knowledge management tools are no longer on
the periphery of major organizations but are instead beginning
to become mission-critical sources of information and
communication. In some places they are supplanting inefficient
email distribution and storage; in other places they are
complementing or displacing file sharing systems, portals and
project management tools that have formed the foundation
of enterprise I.T. installations for years. But in whatever
implementation they find themselves personal knowledge
management tools are becoming the center of user-driven
publishing efforts that need to be an important part of
publishers' plans for adding value to enterprise content
venues.
Doing so can be complicated in an era in which "the"
enterprise is a quantity that's increasingly hard to define.
Greg Lloyd pointed to
an IBM report on global innovation that highlights
enterprises becoming increasingly porous organizations, with
workers who are moving more towards supporting collective goals
with other individuals and institutions than internal-only
goals. Personal knowledge management tools are an important
component of this movement, allowing information and
communications to flow easily from rapidly assembled
collaborative teams with a minimum of forethought required from
I.T. personnel once the fundamental technologies are in place.
In this fluid collaborative environment traditional content
packaging and licensing schemes will be challenged to keep up
with the pace of publishing innovation being championed by
organizations using personal knowledge management tools such as
those highlighted in this panel. Be it wikis, weblogs, group
messaging or other emerging technologies the context in which
content must prove its value is increasingly in the hands of
peers communicating with peers. To many publishers, though,
collaborative publishing still echoes with the negativity
associated with early file sharing services that sloshed
unlicensed music around the world.
But instead of rebellious teens we find in these personal
knowledge managment services professionals with high levels of
accountability and auditability trying to communicate
effectively to build multi-million dollar deals or breakthrough
scientific discoveries. Publishers need to accelerate rapidly
their efforts to make their content both highly relevant and
highly accessible in enterprise environments using these
collaborative tools. It will take more flexible controls to
manage licensing, services that can adapt quickly to the needs
of hands-on user/publishers and content packaging that is ready
to have users create content's most valuable context. A tall
order for some, but it's the order of the day when users are
our leading enterprise publishers.
-
John Blossom
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