Personal Knowledge Management

Individual, Organizational and Social Perspectives

David J. Pauleen, G.E. Gorman, G.E. Gorman

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317081876
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Business
• Categoría: Information Management

Individuals need to survive and grow in changing and sometimes turbulent organizational environments, while organizations and societies want individuals to have the knowledge, skills and abilities that will enable them to prosper and thrive. Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) is a means of coping with complex environmental changes and developments: it is a form of sophisticated career and life management. Personal Knowledge Management is an evolving concept that focuses on the importance of individual growth and learning as much as on the technology and management processes traditionally associated with organizational knowledge management. This book looks at the emergence of PKM from a multi-disciplinary perspective, and its contributors reflect the diverse fields of study that touch upon it. Relatively little research or major conceptual development has so far been focused on PKM, but already significant questions are being asked, such as 'is there an inherent conflict between personal and organizational knowledge management and how best do we harmonize individual and organizational goals?' This book will inform, stimulate and challenge every reader. By delving both deeply and broadly into its subject, the distinguished authors help all those concerned with 'knowledge work' and 'knowledge workers' to see how PKM supports and affects individuals, organizations and society as a whole; to better understand the concepts involved and to benefit from relevant research in this important area.

1
The Nature and Value of Personal Knowledge Management

G. E. Gorman and David J. Pauleen

Introduction

Mention Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) and a common reaction is, ‘oh no, not another offshoot of KM!’ In response, our proposition is that PKM differs significantly from Knowledge Management as currently understood, and that PKM is a form of sophisticated career and life management. We suggest that applied PKM may be one way of helping individuals survive, and prosper, through turbulent, complex and changing organizational and social environments.

PKM is a concept that has grown out of a combination of fields as diverse as knowledge management (KM), personal information management, cognitive psychology, philosophy, management science and communications as well as others (Nordin et al. 2009). However, very little empirical research or significant conceptual development has been done with PKM. A search of PKM in major databases turns up just a handful of papers, although study in the area seems to be gaining traction – Online Information Review 33:2 (2009) was a special issue devoted to PKM, and there are numerous websites and references to PKM, many of sound quality.

We know that PKM focuses on helping individuals become more effective in personal, organizational and social environments. The existing literature clearly points to PKM as a means of increasing individual effectiveness in work environments such as teams and organizations, and in the knowledge society generally. While the traditional view of KM focuses on managing organizational knowledge – including the knowledge that individuals possess – through combinations of technology and management processes, the core focus of PKM is ‘personal enquiry’: the quest to find, connect, learn and explore (Clemente and Pollara 2005). We believe that there are four essential and practical areas that an individual must ‘master’ to engage in effective PKM: management, learning, communication, interpersonal skills and use of technology. We suggest that a fifth area, forecasting and anticipating, would be a highly desirable, though arguably more difficult, set of skills to acquire.

In this chapter we first examine the evolving nature of knowledge work and the rapidly changing organizational and social environment that we believe necessitates an individual approach to KM. We also raise the issue of potential conflict between PKM and Organizational Knowledge Management (OKM) and how organizations might support PKM to bring greater effectiveness to OKM programmes. Then we look at how individuals can develop PKM strategies to remain competitive, and we focus on several practical aspects of KM. Finally, we discuss whether PKM might require a modicum of wisdom to be truly effective.

The World Turns and Change Occurs

In this section we highlight two aspects or problems of the evolving nature of knowledge work as it relates to environmental change (both organizational and social); both aspects, information overload and the changing nature of work, support the need for PKM.

To begin with information overload, no one doubts that individuals face the enormous problem of having access to more information than they can comfortably assimilate and manage. Information overload is a prime example of an environmental change that rapidly – and critically – affects how individuals manage and act upon their knowledge. We all know first hand the causes of information overload: large amounts of information are pushed at us through such channels as email, text messages, phone calls, radio and television, while the Internet makes available massive amounts of information of questionable veracity through websites, blogs and the like.

Equally problematic is the reality that information overload can hinder decision-making and judgment by causing stress and cognitive impediments, colloquially understood as ‘paralysis by analysis’. Rooney and McKenna (2005, 316) capture the futility of always needing to know more and to have access to more information, explaining: ‘More uncertainty demands more knowledge, more knowledge increases complexity, more complexity demands more abstraction, more abstraction increases uncertainty.’

While the cause of information overload is due in part to technology, the cure is also partly technology – but it is how one chooses and uses technology that is critical. One of the problems in writing about technology is the speed of change; what we refer to as current is already passé as soon as ideas are committed to print. Nevertheless, we believe technology is a tool that can assist in making PKM more effective, but in no way should the technology be viewed as an equivalent of PKM. That is, technology and its dependents such as social media are the handmaidens of PKM, nothing more.

The changing nature of work is the second environmental issue or problem affecting individuals. This problem seems to spell the end of the social compact of single career and lifetime employment, which, if not in practice, certainly existed as an ideal prior to the twenty-first century. Competitive pressures on organizations continue to grow, as does the need for greater flexibility and skill sets. As a consequence, competitive pressures on individuals are also increasing, and more diverse and unpredictable career paths are becoming common. Responsibility for self-development and lifelong learning is now in the hands of the individual, who increasingly controls the development of their career and destiny. In the world of the modern knowledge worker, it has become necessary for individuals to maintain, develop and market their skills to give them any chance of competitive advantage in the job market in both the short and long term. This conflict of priorities between individuals and organizations represents the changing contract between employees and organizations (Byrne 2001; Viedma and Enache 2008). This new reality begs the question: is there an inherent conflict between organizational KM and PKM and what, if anything, can be done to harmonize individual and organizational knowledge goals?

Organizational Knowledge Management

While an individual-focused KM approach might seem at first blush to be in conflict with conventional organization-based KM, we suggest that PKM might be a path for effectively instilling a KM ethic into the organization as a whole.

Since its inception as a field of study in the 1990s KM has focused on organizational knowledge and how it can be exploited. However, from the beginning practitioners and academics such as Davenport and Prusak (1998) forcefully pointed out that much organizational knowledge resides in the minds of individual employees working in the organization. It could be argued that PKM, with its emphasis on the communicative individual, refocuses the locus of ongoing knowledge creation on the individual (Wolfe 2010).

The traditional view of KM is centred on enabling the corporate body to be more effective by ‘recording’ and making available what its people know, and the emphasis in KM research has remained on how to ‘prise’ knowledge out of people, either by making it explicit and entering it into an information system (or knowledge management system) or, possibly more realistically, encouraging employees, as communicative individuals, to share knowledge in social and professional situations such as communities of practice. Except for adopting the negative perspective and pointing out that ‘knowledge is power’, and therefore individuals lack the incentive to share, little attention has been given to the perspective of the individual and their personal knowledge.

Two factors are at play here, and there is a natural tension between them. First, much, if not most, of an organization’s critical knowledge resides with the employees. Of course organizational knowledge can be found in established business processes and formal patents, but creative, innovative knowledge and the kind of yet-to-be-realized knowledge critical to an organization’s survival over time resides with individuals (Murphy and Pauleen 2007). There is, then, a very natural tension here between the knowledge individuals potentially offer their organization and the very personal feelings these individuals have about what they know and have experienced over the course of their lifetimes.

We do not seek to resolve this issue, but we believe that the success of organizational KM strategies ultimately rests on how well organizations value and can strengthen the individual employee’s quest for personal knowledge, self-esteem and even self-realization. This is not a new idea: 3M has long allowed their most creative and innovative employees time and resources to work on projects of their own choosing. Google does much the same with their programme that allows engineers to spend 20 per cent of their time working on ‘what they are passionate about’ (Google Jobs 2009). In both cases organizational innovation is a direct result of allowing employees the freedom to find, connect, learn and explore (Clemente and Pollara 2005).

In view of this scenario, if organizations take PKM seriously, the ‘what’s in it for me?’ factor is taken care of immediately, facilitating quicker individual buy-in for the whole KM concept. The difficulty is how to convince a traditional company that developing an individual employee’s quest for knowledge necessarily leads to better OKM.

PKM and the Knowledge Worker

PKM is a response to the idea that knowledge workers, like all individuals, increasingly must be responsible for their own growth and learning. Recent research into an emerging class of mobile knowledge workers called ‘offroaders’ shows that these individuals are consciously and proactively seeking new knowledge, even knowledge not directly related to their current work (Harmer and Pauleen 2010). This is an aspect of lifelong learning related to information literacy, discussed below.

All individuals require processes and tools by which they can evaluate what they know in a given situation, and then seek ways to fill the gaps when needed. Technology can be a very helpful tool, but the fundamentals of PKM are not predicated on technology, as noted earlier. Nevertheless, there is a strong undercurrent in PKM that does emphasize its technological aspect, and we cannot deny that this is widely accepted. According to Mitchell (2004), Barth stresses that

PKM involves a range of relatively simple and inexpensive techniques and tools that anyone can use to acquire, create and share knowledge, extend personal networks and collaborate with colleagues without having to rely on the technical or financial resources of the employer.

Indeed, later in this chapter we make passing mention of the possible uses of Facebook and Connotea as technological tools for assisting in PKM management. But we do not wish readers to assume that PKM is simply another technical process.

The history of PKM begins with the idea of the knowledge worker (Drucker 1968). In PKM one key area of interest is how people become knowledge workers, and especially how they maintain their currency as knowledge workers. Davenport and Prusak’s (1998, 5) oft-cited definition of working knowledge is very much directed toward the individual and can serve as a starting point for investigating PKM: ‘a fluid mix of framed experience, values, contextual information, and expert insight that provides a framework for evaluating and incorporating new experiences and information’.

To expand this definition to encompass PKM, we add that individuals need to know how to decide on and seek new and relevant information, knowledge, experiences and ‘learnings’. The focus must be on the need for the constant renewal of knowledge for ever-changing environments. To facilitate this the individual is increasingly in charge of managing and anticipating career changes and challenges, as noted above.

The roots of PKM are, as previously stated, multidisciplinary. One of the more apparent antecedents is personal information management (PIM), stemming from research in library and information management and personal productivity tools and software. PIM and early PKM developed quickly in response to the technology revolution and the resulting problem of information overload (Jefferson 2006). Early work in this area focused on helping university students develop information literacy skills and use technology to organize and use information (Frand and Hixon 1999; Avery et al. 2001). Recent studies with postgraduate students have shown that there is a recursive relationship between applied PKM and PIM, with skills sets in both growing simultaneously over time (Benitez and Pauleen 2009).

The technological approach to PKM is important, but we believe it is limited. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that we believe it should be limited. As in organizational forms of KM, it is often the case that the technology is equated with a solution. We emphasize that there is much more to PKM than technology and look to other, more recent and multidisciplinary approaches. These approaches, while not always explicitly acknowledging PKM, have focused on the development of skills and attitudes that lead to more effective cognition, communication, collaboration, creativity, problem solving, lifelong learning, social networking, leadership and the like. These approaches make PKM qualitatively different from information management and can help individuals better understand information and knowledge and put them into a context that allows more effective decision-making (Dorsey 2000; Zuber-Skerritt 2005; Jefferson 2006) regarding career and life choices.

Where to Begin? The Practical Aspects of PKM

In this section we introduce the five areas we believe should be the focus of PKM strategy: management, lifelong learning, communication and interpersonal skills, use of technology and forecasting and anticipating. Rapidly changing environments present challenges for individuals who are trying to cope. We believe a PKM strategy that develops increased personal competence in these areas should assist individuals in maintaining knowledge currency and improving decision-making in relation to employment and life opportunities.

MANAGEMENT

A PKM strategy can be summarized as taking charge and developing a plan to:

anticipate → explore → find → connect → learn → act.

Within this strategy the management aspect primarily concerns how to determine and structure a PKM strategy that meets one’s personal situation and how to maintain and update it as necessary. This form of self-management requires an understanding of self, including one’s strengths and weaknesses. The objective is not merely to reach goals ‘out there’ but to reflect continuously, to improve one’s inner self and to develop a philosophy of living.

LIFELONG LEARNING

Second, lifelong learning in the form of ongoing adult education and training is likely to be an important part of any PKM strategy. Subjects of study and upgrading of skills would be determined by the changing business environment (if a job is being outsourced overseas, determine what positions are likely to remain). Personal interests and predilections are also important in determining what to study, as these will generate the most enthusiasm and may lead to unforeseen opportunities. Reading widely in a variety of subject areas may open up new horizons and lead to further study. While organizations can, and sometimes do, provide opportunities for personal development and learning, ultimate responsibility remains with the individual to determine and act on an appropriate strategy.

COMMUNICATION AND INTERPERSONAL SKILLS

Third, communication and interpersonal skills are another fundamental component of effective PKM. Here communication encompasses a variety of skills and abilities beyond giving an effective presentation or writing persuasively. As Murphy (2010) argues, perception, intuition, expression, visualization, interpretation and design are all critical forms of communication.

We also believe that cross-cultural knowledge and skills facilitate effective, empathetic communication in a globally connected world and that opportun...