KM helps you be lazy!*

Imagine this scenario: you’re working hard on a project or task, you’ve got a deadline you’ve got to meet, but you’re stuck, you don’t know how to finish.

What do you do?

Well, if you are experienced in the ways of knowledge management you:

  • ask your colleagues,
  • ask the Community of Practice you’re a member of,
  • search in your expertise location system or yellow pages at peoples profiles,
  • post something on your internal Q&A or social media application,
  • you search your corporate document management system, ECM system, or other such repository/repositories to find the answer.

And you find the answer, doing considerably less work than creating the solution yourself and you meet your deadline. With all that time you saved you take a couple of minutes to post the solution, so that someone in your shoes days/weeks/months/years from now can find your solution and be lazy too!

*Thanks to Kathleen Wilson for the idea for this post.

The Decline of Conversation and Collaboration?

I came across this post/article today discussing the decline of conversation and collaboration, so thought I would share.

As someone who uses technology a lot (or maybe that should be more than I would like), I would tend to agree with his theme. I think we have lost the art of conversation and the ability to listen and negotiate and understand a different perspective. We see this play-out everyday at work and in the world around us e.g. politics and customer service: everyone wants things their way and doesn’t want to have to discuss their beliefs.

Thoughts?