Knowledge Management Achetypes

Patrick Lambe of the Green Chameleon published this great collection of archetypal characters to represent a a range of attitudes and behaviors that a knowledge management professional is likely to encounter: Getting Management Buy-in For KM.

Now if I can just figure out which group I fall into. Captain KM?

User Types

The Pew Internet and American Life Project released a report: A Typology of Information and Communication Technology Users [PIP_ICT_Typology.pdf]


From their press release: "Fully half of adults have a more distant or non-existent relationship to modern information technology. Some of this diffidence is driven by people’s concerns about information overload; some is related to people’s sense that their gadgets have more capacity than users can master; some is connected to people’s sense that things like blogging and creating home-brew videos for YouTube is not for them; and some is rooted in people’s inability to afford or their unwillingness to buy the gear that would bring them into the digital age."

They Came up with 10 separate groups:

• Omnivores (8%)
• Connectors (7%)
• Lackluster Veterans (8%)
• Productivity Enhancers (8%)
• Mobile Centrics (10%)
• Connected But Hassled (10%)
• Inexperienced Experimenters (8%)
• Light But Satisfied (15%)
• Indifferents (11%)
• Off the Network (15%)

I found this more interesting as to how it applies to users in the enterprise. Who will use the knowledge management tools and technology tools?

An RSS Aggregator is a River of News

Jack Vinson, in his Knowledge Jolt blog, used the metaphor of a "Streams of news" in describing an RSS aggregator.

Attensa has a feature called the "river of news" where they combine all of the RSS feed postings into one list to literally give you a river of news as a quick to scan headlines.

The river of news is similar to what people experience with email. It is as if someone were emailing you all of these stories for you to read. But instead of them clogging your email with more items that do not require your action, they are set to the side in the aggregator.

Below is an image of the river of news in my Attensa demo.

Knowledge Advisors at HP

I found Stan Garfield's description of Knowledge Advisors at HP to be a great definition

"Knowledge advisors perform the following tasks:

1. Help users learn about and use the available people, process, and technology KM components. Provide consulting on processes and tools.
2. Facilitate collaboration. Connect people to others who can help them or whom they can help.
3. Direct users to the right knowledge sources based on their specific needs. Locate relevant knowledge resources.
4. Assist users in searching for content and knowledge. Find reusable content.
5. Actively offer assistance to work teams. Engage by contacting users, not just waiting for requests to arrive.
6. Review content submitted to repositories for compliance to quality standards, and follow up as required to improve quality.
7. Solicit user feedback. Direct feedback to the right person within the KM team.
8. Conduct training. Create and record self-paced courses.
9. Search for information to help meet deadlines. Send search results to users who are not connected to the network.
10. Network with other knowledge advisors. Back each other up. Help respond to requests. Take over open requests at the end of the work day based on being in different time zones."

Stan also published a report by Knowledge Street "Advisors at Hewlett-Packard: Connecting People with Information" that provides insight to the mix of people, technology and process.

It is the mixing of these three that are the core of a knowledge management project.