Still thinking of personal KM… There is a very funny analogy here with KM in general: some people are fixated on PKM technologies and others saying that this is wrong (next to it, of course, there is a whole discussion on using the “wrong” term to label the phenomenon :)
For me the truth is somewhere in between. You can hardly think about successful KM initiatives that do not employ any technology at all, but at the same time it’s almost obvious that technology is not the solution, but only part of it and, probably not the most critical part. It’s about why and how you use technologies and, most important, how they fit working practices and social fabric behind them.
Explaining my PhD research and ideas behind personal KM I find one-person enterprise metaphor useful (please, note that I stole this idea and some others from time management book by Gleb Archangelsky).
So, think of yourself as about a knowledge-intensive company:
- What are your main products?
- Who are your customers and suppliers? How do you manage relations with them?
- What functions do you have? Which departments? Do they work well with each other?
- What technologies do you use to support your work? Do they integrate well?
- How do you optimise your work?
I’d say that my PhD work is mainly about functions/departments of one-person enterprise and their relations…
Unrelated note: there are several blog discussions on PKM that I’m following without being engaged much because of time constrains… Hope I’ll be able to add soon…
Tags: knowledge networker, personal knowledge managementArchived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/09/10.html#a1341; comments are here.