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PKM is managing your information flow

Personal Knowledge management is nothing more than managing information flow, getting the right information so you can act on it quickly.

PKM and Enterprise Use

Personal knowledge management tools such as weblogs, wikis and online messaging systems are creating easily accessed knowledge on the fly with simple features and rapidly implemented structure to get communities of peers surfacing answers and collective insights for critical issues.

It is a trend that is changing enterprise publishing as much as it has changed the Web as we know it today.

While personal knowledge management tools are now familiar to many Web surfers, these tools take on a whole new light when they are applied to the needs of major enterprises, their clients and suppliers - especially as they present new challenges for commercial publishers trying to get their content into the right contexts in today's business environment.

Many publishers and aggregators focus on devising big-ticket workflow solutions for enterprises that use technology-intensive tools to put their premium content in the most valuable context.

But personal knowledge management tools allow users to devise their own workflow solutions on an as-needed basis - solutions that may come together long before a publisher or aggregator has been able to engineer their value equation into the user-driven publishing mix.

As demonstrated by the panelists for this session personal knowledge management is really about eliminating the IT gibberish that hangs up so many collaborative efforts and getting to the important thing: passionate professionals communicating effectively with peers through flexible, easy-to-use publishing tools.

(c) John Blossom

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Wikipedia definition of PKM

Personal knowledge management (PKM) is a label for the effort to integrate personal information management (PIM), focused on individual skills, with knowledge management (KM). Many people undertaking this task have taken an organizational perspective. From this perspective, understanding of the field has developed in light of expanding knowledge about human cognitive capabilities and the permeability of organizational boundaries. The other approach for PKM is metacognitive - it compares various modalities within human cognition as to their competence and efficacy (Sheridan, 2008).

Wikipedia definition of PKM

Knowledge Management Definition

Personal Knowledge Management comprises the following:

Recording your thoughts in useful, creative ways that yield even more interesting ideas, context, and insights
Organizing and storing your thoughts and outside information that one thinks is relevant
Sharing your ideas and observations

This is done by tools that help the user easily retrieve, juxtapose, compare, or combine specific ideas and information.

Powerjournal is such a tool!

What is Personal Knowledge Management?

Personal information management is how individuals collect, organize and use information in their personal space .

How people collect information is very personal.

For organizations it is increasingly difficult to maximize all this know how to their advantage (create new products and services, expand into new markets, innovate etc.) The best way is to bring people together to interact with eachother. Experience is that people don't use the systems that store all the information.

People don't want to look backward but want to look forward , people define problems differently.

New technology makes personal knowledge management very different but also some patterns remain the same.

People now use directories but some people are so used to making folders named May 2010 that they keep on using these directory names for filing reports, even the technology could easily retrieve a file based on the date.

PIM workspace has changed, people now easily refer to locations on the web as if it is their own desktop, because it is supposed to be accessible at all times.

Work and private life is also much more integrated today than it was 10 years ago. E.g. a laptop now often contains a combination of private and workfiles where in the past there was a more clear separation. The challenge in knowledge management is to dump both the tacit and explicit knowledge into a database.

There aren't good tools for pulling things up from the documents of the past and reminding you what is in your workplace. The old way of physically filing things can be a stimulating activity. We don't have a good equivalent for that in the electronic age. Because filing is a mentally stimulating in that it makes you see the connections with projects you are currently working on.