Richard McDermott in a track session now and I plan to be good (if you understand this you understand it, if you don't you don't). Starts by asking how technology changes the world? Sees this as a conundrum which he defines as a problem having only a conjectural answer or is a intricate or difficult problem. Solving a conundrum for him is a classical divide the problem up into separate questions, keep possibilities open, track stray thoughts, get a different perspective and forget about it for a bit. This is what Richard is good at, capturing material from multiple sources and summarising it is simple language. Not sure where he is going with it though. He has now moved onto mills being introduced into the US challenging agrarian myths. Ah, system created for technology, use of the clock that ran the mills. Integration to agrarian - let your daughters work here and they will return undamaged with a dowery.
Sees a problem for knowledge management in that it has focused on the tool, not how the tool sits within the whole. Remembering that Richard is a great weather vane, a lead indicator of when novel ideas are becoming main stream.
Myths
- The right information to the right people at the right time
- If only our company knew what our company knows
- We review toos for empowering knowledge workers with greater finability and share ability of enterprise information including expertise, improve employee productivity increased customer satisfaction and reduced time to market for new products and services
Argues that KM has become a back office tool - people, process and technology and enterprise 20 tools for combined working, Outcomes are quicker information, more contacts etc.
He asks a question: What if we designed KM to specifically support what people do with knowledge? What would we focus on?
Now saying that thinking is either analytical (conscious) or intuition (adaptive unconscious). False dichotomy there but a common one; neither exists without the other. Uses the example of the ability of deep experts to have high tuned intuition (its not intuition, its embodied knowledge built over time through education and experience but OK I'll go with the flow for now
Another question: What if we designed KM to be more specifically tuned to each of these activities? What would we design?
Example here is risk assessment to simplify analytic tasks, enhancing intuition through collaborative discourse.
Being brought to a close now by the chairman, talking about potential for the future. My big issue here is that the solution is entirely within the systems dynamics paradigm. Nothing wrong with that as there is extensive value is systems approaches, but they start to fall down when the level of uncertainty contra-indicates a basically engineering approach.
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