Knowledge Animal

Invisible effects of blogging

Though I am -a not very active- beginner, blogging does change my life (well, some aspects of it). I have this imaginary audience in the back of my mind since I started my blog. When I read a book or paper, I do this just a bit more reflective and I articulate my ideas a bit more elaborate than before. Nobody notices, as I do this while thinking for myself. These private reflections and articulations feel good and seem even useful to me. So far, in many instances I do not take the time to write down things in a post. Maybe some day, some of those ideas appear in my weblog, maybe not.

Experienced bloggers, do you recognize above? And do you know of other invisible effects of blogging?

Social animals

Knowledge animals may seem anti-social. We are not. Knowledge animals are programmed to seek company of others. Let me explain why I think so.

The selfishness and proud of knowledge animals do not prevent them from socialising. The care for off-spring, drive for survival can explain quite well why people are actually social animals. Like animals lived in groups and cooperated to protect their members to predators, people and their organisations —through cooperation— develop a competitive edge against other people and organisations. Socializing, being in (virtual) neighborhood of one another eases cooperation and is therefore beneficial for survival.

So we, knowledge animals are actually programmed to seek company of colleagues, friends, peers. Let's have a drink toghether ;-)

Knowledge maps to visualise knowledge traces

If centralised knowledge bases do not align with the 'natural' knowledge behaviour of people, say our knowledge animal behaviour, what does? I and my colleagues believe knowledge maps do. However, I/we see not just the positive side of knowledge maps. What do you think?

In the work I do with my colleagues, ‘knowledge maps’ are aggregations and visualisations of information and communication aimed to provide easier access to the information and knowledge that is available within an organisation. Knowledge maps are automatically generated from the existing systems.

As my colleague Wolf puts it: "In terms of the information-foraging jungle, knowledge-mapping technology cuts away the bushes and the undergrowth, exposing traces and territories more clearly than they were before."

It makes individual traces more clearly visible, and it can also make people’s territories easier to recognise. An interesting research question is how this change in visibility triggers changes in people’s behaviour. The extent to which knowledge mapping exposes traces and territories depends on the focus of the knowledge-mapping system in question. Different systems may have different focuses and will thereby trigger different changes in behaviour. From an individual’s point-of-view, making traces more visible is on the one hand positive because it can be used to raise the individual’s awareness of other people’s knowledge and to ease information and knowledge seeking in organisations. In addition, it provides the opportunity to display one’s own traces and territory more prominently, so others are able to find you or the documents you write better. On the other hand, it is also negative in the sense that it becomes much harder to hide the traces one does not want to be seen. Also traces may mislead people who search for information and knowledge, in case traces are followed at times they are not relevant anymore.

To conclude knowledge maps have the potential to make knowledge traces that people leave visible and this in turn may facilitate searching for information and knowledge. Currently however, the visibility of knowledge traces has an unknown impact on the information and knowledge behaviour of people.

For me it is an intriguing questions how we /humans will change our 'knowledge animal' behaviour when traces are more visible. And what will organisations do with that, for the better and the worse (big brother)?

Why centralised knowledge bases do not work

I am aware that the metaphor of knowledge animals is not a theory, it is just a 'wild idea'. Nevertheless, it helps me and my colleagues (among others Lilia )to come up with explanations for several successes and -so to say- less fortunate KM-interventions. The following explanations resulted from a short discussion on why centralised knowledge bases do not work (i.e. have limited value). Please feel free to add to this list of explantions or to add your examples of (un)successful KM-interventions.

Knowledge bases do not take into account that:
- people consult people even for documents as long as this is faster, easier (k-animals are lazy and want maximum output with minimal effort)
- people consult people even for documents, as quality and relvance etsimates are useful, and for this you need knowledge, thus people
- people mostly like snacking, and only sometimes nutritious meals like reports
- people need pure 'information scent' not made up traces
- people leave valuable traces anyway, but in their own territories, not somewhere else
- people people are proud and cherish their own spaces -territories- and the cost of shared spaces
- re-using knowledge of others (i.e., other territories) is hard, it is like battles in the frontier areas of territories; k-bases are not sufficient to support knowledge re-use
- ......