From documents to conversations--even in the KM world
Now even Knowledge Management mavens are getting into conversation.
KM used to focus on data mining, particularly in loose unstructured
documents like emails, or a million Word documents sitting out on the
hard disks of the employees.
But once you have identified and organized all that information, what good is it?
You have to get some conversations going, and, when most of your
experts are spread out around the world, many of those conversations
are going to be virtual.
Lynnette Freese, a program manager at Rockwell Collins, recently
redefined KM as "linking people to people and people to
information so that we can think together for better business results."
Holy collaboration!
At a recent conference put on by Braintrust International Freese got together with a bunch of other folks who do KM for a living—and a few theorists from
academia.
Seth Kahan, for instance, was there. Kahan bills himself as an
organizational community specialist; he facilitates discussion
through something he calls "jumpstart storytelling," aiming
to build "constructive conversations."
Rob Cross, an Assistant Professor at UVA's business school,
argues that social networking is the way work really gets done in an
organization.
Like Seth Godin in Unleashing the Idea Virus, Cross creates a taxonomy of
the movers and shakers in a social network, focusing on the
energizers (engaged, engaging, positive, optimistic), or as Godin
would call them, sneezers.
Increasingly, we're building the infrastructure to support these
conversations, often entirely over the network, rather than in
person.
For a summary of this aspect of the conference, see Jane Dysart's
article, "Conversations and communities," in the May 2004
issue of KM World.
Bonus: the same issue has a funny piece by Dave Weinberger, author of
the Journal of the Hyperlinked Organization (JOHO).
He describes a live conference where he and his buddies were using an
IRC backchannel to chat, electronically, making comments about the speakers, the conference, the air conditioning, while apparently just sitting
there quietly, during the live presentations.
They were "Talking amongst ourselves, in the shorthand of
friends, about how to assimilate what the speaker was saying. To
someone outside our little social group, it would certainly look
disrespectful, but it was no more so than the sort of conversation
one might have after a presentation: skipping over the parts you
agreed with, focusing in quick jabs on the interesting points of
disagreement."
Weinberger admits they were making jokes, and at one point he had to
get up and leave the room, so as not to laugh out loud.
Now that is a real virtual conversation.
As Weinberger says, "Put humans together and we'll figure out
what we'll do with the connection. The less you try to tell us
about what we ought to be doing, the better, and the quicker we'll
invent something new for ourselves. Just be sure not to shush us."
9:16:17 AM 
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