Date: Wed, 26 Sep 2001 15:33:50 -0400
Mr. Rod Welch
rowelch@attglobal.net
The Welch Company
440 Davis Court #1602
San Francisco, CA 94111 2496
| Subject: | Intelligence Changes IT to a Culture of Knowledge |
Rod,
I've just spent over an hour awed and overwhelmed as I read through the documents you sent links to. There's a lot to digest here. I still don't know what "SDS" means, and it took quite a while to make sense of the some of the other acronyms (e.g. POIMS).
I was/am most impressed by the analysis and criticism of the Designing Organizational Memory paper.
Some of the concerns about organizational memory and effective KM, concerns about specific tools and actual case studies, have been partly addressed in more recent papers. Most but not all of the relevant papers are at....
In particular, I recommend Facilitated Hypertext for Collective Sensemaking...
The key discovery of the past decade for me is that the KM bottleneck is due to the disconnect between KM systems, which are document oriented, and face-to-face meetings, which are conversation-oriented and which are where much of the thinking and learning in a project happen. That's what the STM metaphor is meant to suggest, and it's the focus of my own Dialog Mapping approach and Verizon's Compendium approach: building a bridge between the two environments (synchronous meetings/conversations and asynchronous everything else) where (knowledge) work happens.
On a side note, the analysis of work as Plan-Perform-Report, or any similar linear sequence, does not square with much recent thinking about situated cognition and the reflective practitioner. I can't tell from the POIMS document if the idea is to support the linear model or to transport the manager beyond it with appropriate tools.
Also, I share your frustration that there are all these "bright lights" with similar ideas and commitments and yet a coherent project is slow in gelling. Perhaps we need a conference or workshop (or several) to focus and galvanize us into a community of action and a funded project. I don't know.
I am, alas, mostly absorbed with getting my own business going these days, so even email exchanges like this are a luxury.
Finally, I'm not sure what action is called for in your letter to Stuart Harrow -- I don't have enough context. I also have some thoughts about how to better "connect the dots", in a short essay "Making Sense of Fragmented Information"
Thank you for your time and energy in writing. I am eager to see what magic emerges from this heady stew of talent.
Yours,
Jeff
Dr. Jeff Conklin
jeff.conklin@verizon.net
jeff@cognexus.org
Collaborative Display, Collective Intelligence