Klognets as enterprise early warning system..
Dewayne Mikkelson pointed to a post by McGee about knowledge sharing, knowledge logs, and the unexpected. (Emphasis mine.)
Do you live in a changing world? New rules? New problems and threats? New opportunities? New world views?
Are you in touch with reality? Are you keeping it fresh? Challenging your assumptions?
Are you doing it alone? McGee:
Their essential argument is that organizations need to become more mindful in two ways.
First, they must become better at anticipating the unexpected. Second, they must become more adept at containing the unexpected. Containing might either mean keeping a small error from mushrooming into a disaster or seizing and running with an opportunity before others do.
Their arguments dovetail nicely with the recent discussions around the role of knowledge logs or klogs as a tool for knowledge sharing. The essence of dealing with the unexpected is in separating weak signals from the background noise and then understanding who in the organization has the requisite expertise to deal with the signal. The knowledge sharing enabled by the effective use of k-logs is squarely focused on precisely these two issues.
Klogs detect and respond:
A loose network of knowledge workers maintaining weblogs represents that early warning system for an organization. Weblogs applied to organizational knowledge problems provide an outlet for picking up early signals of the unexpected and amplifying them so they can be better heard. They also serve as a system for surfacing diverse expertise in the organization that may bear on how to respond effectively to those signals.
Klogs are better at new knowledge than mature:
More formal and structured knowledge management systems are focused on getting more mileage out of known solutions to known problems. That has a place, particularly in large and dispersed organizations. But all organizations today are also faced with the problem of responding effectively to the unexpected. Weick and Sutcliffe make a compelling case that this is the more important problem for most organizations. And they offer a series of prescriptions for increased mindfulness to respond to that problem. For me, they provide the puzzle piece that links my intuitions that knowledge sharing and k-logs are an essential element of effective knowledge management to the critical items on the strategic agenda.
Mature knowledge is proven, structured, endorsed, refined. It sounds a lot like curriculum, the province of Learning Management more than Knowledge Management.
McGee has it right.
Klogs marshall your collective observational and analytic powers. They massively amplify your ability to sense, prioritize, and respond to change. Klogs can be your DEW line, your trip wire, your radar microphone, your clued-in Huggy Bear with an ear on the street. They can also be your think tank, a home grown war college, your business intelligence in the deepest sense of the term.
[aka klogs]
[a klog apart]