Knowledge-at-work

Boundary objects revisted

Reading the recent discussions around KM and ethnography hosted by Richard Cross at AOK, I was reminded of the very useful role boundary objects often play when you are looking to understand roles, activities, tacit knowledge and working methods.

I often use boundary objects as a framework in knowledge mapping, where they provide a useful way to organise observations, give the participants something tangible to hang their observations, gather their stories and focus the inquiry.

My practice is to identify the key BOs and then to track these across internal organizational boundaries, watching for language changes, differences in meaning, noting changes in importance, reification and seeking informal feedback that happens. Boundary objects are useful when searching for learning points, looking for process improvements, digging deeper into subtle meaning shifts and authority perceptions.

Boundary objects can be a useful starting point for developing an organizational taxonomy, they touch many communities, carry meaning, record status changes or serve as alerts. The passage of a BO initiates activities, enables self-organization, informs on progress, starts or sets time-lines.

My understanding of the role, nature and importance of BOs in knowledge work has been greatly helped by reading Edwin Hutchins "Cognition in the wild" and Susan Leigh Star's many papers.

An ecology behind the firewall

How can business best use web2.0 tools?

The trick in any community is maintaining that delicate balance between diversity, individual opinion (voicing) and collective, reflective insight, finding applicable content, having the freedom to annotate and receiving timely notification.

Encouraging personal views, commentary, opinion, critique and news, helps to ensure diversity, brings in new voices and memes, creates the space for innovative ideas. A RSS enabled blog is the ideal tool for this. Think personal control & ownership, fast learning curve, permanent pointers via unique post URLs, simplified time-based structure, ways to gather feedback via comments and trackback, auto-archiving and more.

The blog allows bottom-up inputs, promotes cross-linking, seeds connections and captures distributed 'conversations'. If the posts are tagged, searchable and available for subscription, these affordances help to promote self-organization.

At another level, we need permanent concept level aggregation, a space where we can get collective information, where current views are synthesized, best practices are made explicit, information is continually updated, sources are referenced and there are pointers to people to contact for help, mentoring, advice and consultation. Here the wiki comes into its own.

Imagine if every business built its own wikipedia!. Authoritative, applicable, crafted, aggregated multimedia content available as text, images, audio files and video.

To tie this ecology together, provide notification, annotation and back-channel links, we will need social bookmarking applications similar to flick'r and Del.icio.us. This will allow cross content notification and referencing, provide the affordance that links items on the wiki with uploaded images, interesting podcasts and points to relevant conent on blogs. The tags allow us to browse related concepts using the tag cloud, giving a broader view than keyword search and avoids the trouble associated with maintaining a strict classification system and taxonomy.

This mix of tools will help promote self-organization, bust functional silos, increase corporate agility, speed decision - action cycles and help to keep employees on the same page.

Now tell me I'm dreaming big time.

KM on-line discourse

Finding places and spaces where knowledge management is the focus of on-line conversation is becoming very difficult.

Act-KM discussion list, which has moved from Yahoo Groups to its own listserv, dominates current KM conversation. Recent topics include 'the essence of KM', 'current trends in KM', 'Knowledge sharing literature and a lengthy thread on moderation policy. The Act-KM forum seems to be languishing and lacks activity.

AOK continues to host interesting topics in its star series, although I would be lying if I said that measurement - the most recent topic, was one of my favorites.

 KnowledgeBoard has all but folded since it's latest redesign and there are few conversations around the document / article dominated interface. This is a shame as KB had a robust community supported with many f2f activities.

Brint is but a Shadow of it's former self - another victim of redesign, forced registration and no user control over topics. This is in stark contrast to the days 1997-2002? when this board was clearly the hub of KM on-line life.

KM forum - the original KM watering hole from 1994, now lingers without a single post in a week.

Gurteen lists other forums, but their traffic is sparse.

Just as activity and opportunity for forum dialog has diminished, so we have seen the rise of KM blogs. These individual (and some group) voices are now the dominant place to gather opinion, offer comments and lead KM awareness. If you have not done so already, I strongly advise you to grab an aggregator (e.g. Bloglines) and subscribe to RSS feeds from the growing band of KM bloggers.

If you are looking for bookmarks and references to KM related stuff, you may wish to subscribe to a Del.icio.us tag feed using some of these keywords:

• KM
• PKM
• knowledge_management
• knowledge-management

Some of the attention has shifted to related topics such as: social software, web2.0, library2.0 or to emergent software genre like wikis, pod- and videocasts - example.

As the on-line KM discourse becomes distributed, diffuse and distracted, we have to adopt new ways to stay connected. Perhaps we will see a regular Skypecast become the next KM watering hole? - If you do start one give me a ping please.