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Martin Röll

Martin Röll
Weblog: www.roell.net/weblog/
Martin Röll was born in Luxembourg and lives in Dresden. He is a consultant for the conception of Websites, Intra- and Extranets, and the use of Weblogs and Wikis for e-Collaboration and knowledge management.
For further information look at: www.roell.net.

Distributed KM - Improving Knowledge Workers' Productivity and Organisational Knowledge Sharing with Weblog-based Personal Publishing
In the transition to a knowledge-based economy, organisations have invested heavily in Document Management, Enterprise Content Management and so-called �Knowledge Management� software systems as part of explicit or implicit knowledge management strategies. Many of the systems that were created followed a paradigm of a centralised repository of the organisation's �knowledge�, embodied in documents. Employees were required to codify their knowledge and submit it to the organisational knowledge base which then could be mined to locate information and experts.
Today we see that few of these systems have been successful. Organisations are facing resistance from the knowledge workers to use the systems and even where resistance have been overcome (usually by incentive systems linked to pay), the systems have not made knowledge workers more productive or knowledge work more effective.
The reason for this failure is that the systems were not designed with the needs of the individual knowledge worker in mind. They had a purely organisational perspective to knowledge management and focused only on the �manageable� aspects of knowledge work. This created a barrier between the personal sphere of the knowledge worker, which in many ways is �unmanageable� and the organisational knowledge management strategy.
This barrier between personal information management, contact management, relationship building and learning of an individual knowledge worker and organisational knowledge management systems needs to be overcome if knowledge sharing and learning is to be improved.
Based on analysis by Lilia Efimova, this paper will discuss knowledge worker's requirements to software tools for knowledge work and point out how first generation knowledge management tools have failed to address their needs. It then proposes a new approach to organisational Knowledge Management based on simple �Social Software� Tools: Weblogs and other Personal Content Management systems that enable individuals to organise, annotate and share personal content and network with other individuals.
Building on the work of Dave Pollard it explains how a decentralised approach to knowledge management based on personal content management tools overcomes the defects of today's centralised systems, empowers knowledge workers and helps them become more effective.

last update: Friday, July 23, 2004 at 10:32:41 AM-----------------------
Copyright 2004