Comments on: We are all in this together http://blog.tarn.org/2009/07/02/we-are-all-in-this-together/ Unpicking traditional assumptions about KM and the life of the law Mon, 14 Nov 2011 13:28:21 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ By: dougcornelius http://blog.tarn.org/2009/07/02/we-are-all-in-this-together/#comment-511 Fri, 03 Jul 2009 00:45:37 +0000 http://blog.tarn.org/?p=491#comment-511 Mark -

That was an odd mix of thoughts smashed together. But I think that’s what many law firms need to do with their IT systems and approach to KM: smash some stuff up.

I think most IT systems push users to isolating information in silos. Even those that encourage sharing, like a document management system, are deeply flawed as sharing tools.

People are complaining about information overflow. KM needs to seize the opportunity to help individuals deal with this flow in a way that is incredibly useful to them and beneficial to the larger organization.

]]> By: Don't Compromise http://blog.tarn.org/2009/07/02/we-are-all-in-this-together/#comment-510 Thu, 02 Jul 2009 23:12:14 +0000 http://blog.tarn.org/?p=491#comment-510 I’m about to mention Vannevar Bush for the second time ina week, which feels rather spooky. To me, the point about the memex idea (the bit of the web we still don’t have – make your own links and connections) was that the memex was personal: it would let us make our own connections between our personal discoveries – which is one of the ways in which we learn anyway. If we can crack that, maybe KM1.0 and KM2.0 are the same thing anyway? Except, except … where is the motivation to the individual to want to make their knowledge widely shared.

And apart from the motivation element, classification will remain a thorny issue, surely. We have too much information (data, knowledge, whatever … stuff). Most of us are skilled indexers, librarians or what have you. Even if there was a shared indexing methodology and heirarchy – and to think I used to work in polyheirarchical thesaurus construction – what is the chance most of us woud learn to use it. Or bother to. Without – that word again – motivation.

It intrigues me Stapp wasn’t the only one working for ‘the public good’: Vannevar Bush was too. But how do we inspire – and reward – that kind of level of altruism on a consistent basis?

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