Subject: Personal Knowledge Management
Presenter: Pascal Sartoretti
Participants: 30
Pascal Sartoretti’s Summary
Items that were discussed around tables
- Mind maps. Some people really like it.
- The document-centric approach : store all your knowledge in files organized in a hierarchical directory structure, and then find one way or another to synchronize it among computers and/or in the cloud.
- Data –> Information –> Knowledge –> Wisdom
- Many controversial issues arose:
- “I need access to very old items†<–> “After 6 months, nothing remains usefulâ€.
- “Mind maps are great†<–> “I am too bad at drawingâ€
- “Mind maps shall be done by hand†<–> “Mind maps shall be done with a toolâ€
- “Mind maps are personal†<–> “Mind maps can be collaboratively builtâ€
Tools that were mentioned
- Mind maps : many various tools were mentioned
- Chandler: Collect your thoughts in 1 place.
- Foxmarks: Syncs bookmarks between FireFox, Safari and IE.
- Delicious: Save all your bookmarks online, share them with other people, and see what other people are bookmarking.
- Toodledo: Organize Your Tasks.
- DropBox: Sync your files online and across computers.
- Rsync: synchronizes files and directories from one location to another while minimizing data transfer using delta encoding when appropriate
- Xobni: Outlook Plugin to Search People, Email, and Attachments.
- Evernote: Capture information in any environment using whatever device or platform you find most convenient, and makes this information accessible and searchable at any time, from anywhere.
- The Brain: Dynamic mind mapping software that lets you link your ideas, files and web pages the way you think.
- Paper notebook (used as a log book)
- Interestingly, I heard no one mentioning Microsoft OneNote: a digital notebook that provides people one place to gather their notes and information, powerful search to find what they are looking for quickly, and easy-to-use shared notebooks so that they can manage information overload and work together more effectively.
My personal conclusion
- The best solution for one person depends on many factors:
- The type of work performed (for instance project-oriented vs. people-oriented).
- Working on a team or autonomous.
- The quality of one’s handwriting or one’s ability to draw.
- The self-discipline that one is ready or able to have.
- As a consequence, the best solution may be very different for two persons, even for two persons working closely on the same project.
- This last point is for me a major roadblock to team- or company-wide knowledge management.
Information is not knowledge,
Knowledge is not wisdom,
Wisdom is not truth,
Truth is not beauty,
Beauty is not love,
Love is not music,
and Music is THE BEST.
— from Frank Zappa, “Packard Goose”
Lionel de Weck’s Table Summary
This mail to report the discussion that took place at my table. Each participant exposed his or her preferred personal digital productivity tool. Among the cited applications, Google and its ecosystem of “Gmail†“note†“document†and other iGoogle applications was heavily mentioned. Another hit runner is MS Exchange with the Outlook client.
Many users need access to their own data no matter where or on which computer or terminal. They appreciate, therefore, very much the hosted services provided by the Google environment or the hosted Exchange version of the Microsoft mailing solution.
Beside these major applications, a list of other useful knowledge capture tools have been mentioned such as Mind Mapping with Mind manager or Personal brain. MS notes has been mentioned as well as Zotero, Tweeter, Poken, Wiki and LinkedIn. An interesting thread of discussion compared the personal practices of either storing information in hierarchical structures made of directories and files versus simply flat filing documents and using indexing search tools such as Google desktop. To improve the search performance, it is recommended to tag and categorize the stored documents.
It looks like the majority of our daily feed of actionable information is stored in our mailing system. The information stored in mails is highly unstructured. Will our mailing tool improve and offer better access? How will we tame the glut of buried information in future mailing systems?
Our personal productivity rely also on our capacity to process properly ordered tasks while accessing the correct Information at every step. What are the light and easy tools that can help us with the modeling and the creation of work flows? SharePoint? Moodle? This is a subject that appeals especially to me. We are living in a service society where new services must be designed and implemented on a daily basis. Competitiveness in the service industry rely increasingly on the capacity to industrialize ever changing business processes. A daunting task if this need to be performed with the classical application software design methodologies.
Tomas Svoboda’s Table Summary
- Based on the discussion of six person at our table here seems to be no dominant or homogenous personal KM system or tools currently in place
- The sophistication of the techniques and tools used depend on
- the individual inclination to adopt new and specialized technologies
- professional and private environment “dictating†specific processes and tools (corporate policies & standardized IT tools ERP & CRM e.g, SAP, PCS), common or best practice or latest fashion / fad
- the degree of interaction and exposure with others
- and its interdependence / motivation to share the knowledge in order to achieve professional and personal objectives
- At the table with 6 persons there was very wide range of techniques, tools and habits ranging from hand written notes (post-its), over consistent storage in HTLM or pdf format, intranet, wiki to sophisticated KM dedicated software tools (MindMap, MindJet, TheBrain) combined with multimedia platform capable to store up to 30min of video for teaching purposes (Moodle)
- Some anecdotic extremes: usage of Palm V model from year 2000 on one case and print out, reading and physically storing of 45’000 A4 pages per year in other or fully paperless – electronic only system (scanning and storing all invoices, faxes, letters, articles, hand-written notes)
- While there is no one-fits-all system it seems that a blend of software and traditional hand-written techniques is still the best solution to process, store and share KM for most
- The increasing pervasiveness of personal electronic tools (due to its affordability, operational simplicity and compact size) seems to lead the trend of using PDA, SmartPhones or laptops as the main tool to process KM
- Bottom line: easy-to-use (fast to learn, simple input and access, intuitiveness) and easy-to-share (for multiple platforms and locations) are the two key parameters for effective personal KM processing.
Personal note: my own system of personal KM system
- Calendar – MS Outlook, color coded per projects, travel details; shareable with assistant
- Contacts – Outlook, combined with business card storage Rolodex system – shareable and customizable for specific mailing or purposes
- Activities – one personal master to do list (“Laundry Listâ€) then project specific activity list with greater level of granulation and shareable with all project participants – in hard copy and on secured intranet side www.tagator.com client zone
- Information – word, excel, ppt, pdf format stored in project / company specific directories with very similar arborescence structure of sub-directories e.g. admin, staff, financial, R&D, Marketing, Sales, Competition, Scientific Data, Manufacturing etc.
- Back-up: daily automated back up on a tape at 23:00, twice a month on a separate HD, occasionally burned on DVD and stocked in home safe.
Alain Giannattasio’s Table Summary
Personal KM Topics
- Notes
- Lists
- ToDo
Methods
- GTD – Getting Things Done
Paper Based Solutions
- Notebooks
- Single Paper Pages (and scanner)
- Simple ToDo Lists
- Daily ToDo Card
Web Tools
- Storing & Sharing Bookmarks
- Delicious
- Information Capture
- Evernotes
- Notes on the web and synch with PC or Mobile Phone. Warning… confidentiality
- Evernotes
-
- Mindomo
- Mindmap on the web
- Mindomo
-
- Gliffy
- Diagrams and flowcharts on the web
- Gliffy
Document Online Synchronization
- GetDropBox
- RSynch
Information Capture
- Excel
Outlook Plugins
- xobni
- SimplyFile
Desktop Search
- GoogleDesktop
Mind Mapping
Cathy Timmers’s Table Summary
We discussed different tools and how we use them. The list was long and varied: notebooks, cell phones, post-its, answering machines, calendars, MS Outlook, Dropbox to sync home vs work systems, and various lists. The Palm Pilot was a popular PDA, and cell phones too.
One person was quite organized and had a personal blog, a work blog, a wiki, and calendars and connected everything somehow via gmail.
Fascinating. One person was moving away from paper altogether and using only electronic tools.
Our best practices included synchronizing your data, connecting the information kept in various systems, backing up your data, having a process to use the tools that work best for you, knowing where to retrieve specific information, and also to share your information with others.
Riccardo Bonazzi’s Table Summary
Are you an “e-mail” or a “telephone” person, i.e. what do you use when you need to tell something important to a distant contact? And how do you retain information when you get an unexpected phone call, which turns out to be important?
Around these questions my table had the pleasure to exchange ideas that can be summarized in the following points:
To be an “e-mail” or a “telephone” person depends on a major part
on cultural issues, both on what concerns the country and the
enterprise we are talking about. To give an example, on the one
hand you might send a mail at 7 in the morning to inform the bank,
which you are working in, that you are sick and you will be
staying home, even if you know that no one will read it. On the
other hand, if you deal with a small enterprise in Italy you might
want to make a call to ask to the other person what he understood
out of the mail that you have just sent.
A good way to deal with unexpected yet important phone calls is to
put down some note and then to send a short meeting report to the
person who had called. This way we will assure we had a common
understanding and we will put on a digital format the conversation.
The second point led us to agree that digital storage needs to be coupled with other solutions. Freeware and open source tools exist to support us while performing different tasks such us breaking a complex problems into sub-components or dealing with the evolution of our proposed solution (as most of the solutions have been already mentioned by the other tables, I shall only mention C-map as a tool, and agree with Gil that new solutions for versioning make the previous filename conventions an obsolete habit). We also talked about filesystems management, multimedia combinations (photos combined with short movies to be then stored and tagged). We agreed on the fact that digital data storage gets sense depending on how much easily it can be retrieved.
Still, one can also rely on distributed form of information retention, such as a network of people to talk with. Sometime the easiest way to retrieve an information is to ask to someone else if she/he recalls it.
As the topic is per se a vast domain I will limit myself to mention also the concept of social map of a company, i.e. who talks with who (without going further towards small-worlds and scale-free structures).
In conclusion a final thought on feelings. Most of the time we might miss to put them on words in a meeting reports, even though some of them, e.g. intuitions, should be made explicit. Indeed it is in the interest of everyone to retain also the most human side of our experiences.
We had a short discussion about that, and we ended up writing on our feelings concerning the KM meeting, which could be synthesized as an interesting experience, which made us eager to get more information on the topic. This is why it should be done in other fields as well.
