JSB on Capturing Context not Just Content

October 17, 2012 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

In John Seeley Brown's KMWorld Keynote (live streamed 17 Oct 2012 at kmworld.com), he makes an important point about how knowledge has no boundaries. @johnseelybrown #KM12

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He goes on to say that the way to manage knowledge in today's age is about capturing context along with content. That's the driving point around Traction TeamPage: Connected Work. It's the reason to build wiki style knowledge bases, integrated with blogs, discussion and tasking.

He goes on to talk about the futility of building profiles and managing inventories of skills by bringing up a case at SAP where the average time to ask and get an answer to a question is 17 minutes. He highlights another case at MITRE where social bookmarking exposes the knowledge and interest areas of each of the employees, while they work.

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That's why we built the Social Enterprise Web module, to make social bookmarking easy and to enable discussion and tagging right into the context of enterprise systems.

In JSB's words - this helps meet a goal he states as the need "to build social and intellectual capital" by capturing the output of emergent processes.

He calls sharing in this way as intimate legitimate peripheral participation. PIt's a way to be intimate within working groups, but allow for social listening at scale.

Another terrific example he raises is how to cope when an ERP calls out an exception condition. A social process has to take over.

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Employees have to raise, discuss and resolve the issue. Exception handling is a key issue brought up by his work at Deloitte. A system process issue becomes a social process issue to be handled and resolved. Knowledge about the decision is brought together, from content, context and active problem solving.

That's connected work, and why it matters. That's why connecting context with content is relevant and why we could "inherently want to share."

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