Week 3 – Discussion and Guest Speaker Ed Brill

Week 3 - Discussion

What did we cover in this week’s lecture? Let’s start out with the question of the week, what is the difference between collaboration and Knowledge Management? First off all I believe that you need collaboration for a Knowledge Management system but the same does not hold true the other way around. Having a worked with Portal in the past for example I have seen that most if not all Knowledge Management software solutions come with some sort of collaboration toolset. There are real-time and non-real-time collaboration tools. An example of these would be forums/blogs where users can create discussion forums or comment on them or Instant Messaging where users can literally communicate with each other instantly via text messaging. Of course there is the all too popular email which I guess falls somewhere in between real-time and non-real-time collaboration.

So what exactly is collaboration? Merriam-Webster has collaboration defined as “to work jointly with others or together especially in an intellectual endeavor. It is basically two or more people working towards the same goal. Knowledge Management is more or less a set of procedures and best practices used by a company/organization to gather, create and distribute knowledge. Collaboration would definitely be one of the tools used within Knowledge Management to gather, create and distribute knowledge.

Another interesting question asked during the lecture was do we need technology for collaboration. In my opinion, I don’t think we need technology for collaboration. Where is the technology in two people having a conversation in the lobby? If the question was “do you need technology for affective collaboration?” then I might think twice. Technology is there to help the collaboration process, key word being HELP.


Guest Speaker – Ed Brill

There are two points that Ed Brill brought up that really touched home for me. One of them being the whole idea of the virtual workplace. It is amazing how it is more common place in today day and age to not only be able to work outside of the office but not have to meet with your management team on a regular basis. With so many companies being global and with today’s technology making this possible, why not. From my experience I find that I actually get more done when I work from home then I do when I am in the office. This is partly because of less distractions and of course not having to factor in the daily three hour commute to and from the office.

Two years ago my company started the work from home pilot and being such a big success we have expanded the benefit to other departments within the organization. My company is global so I meet with people all around the world from the comfort of my office, at home or at the Wrigley Facility. What makes this possible is technology. We have an Enterprise Portal that we use for Knowledge Management and collaboration. We built the portal using a taxonomy that fit the organization making navigation straight forward. The Document repository is indexed so it is easy to search for information. If we needed to hold a meeting we can easily use WebEx conferencing. And we are always reachable thanks to like Ed Brill calls them the all famous “CRACKBERRY”.

The other quick point that Ed brought up in his presentation was how a company’s assets walk out the door every day at 5 PM. That was such a great line when you think about it. We all agree that Knowledge is an asset. A lot of organizations knowledge is stuck within its employees because it is tacit knowledge that cannot be easily dispersed. I suppose this is where Knowledge Management is supposed to help. How do we collect this unstructured information? Do we really need to collect the information or are we fine with using a hybrid network model for Knowledge Management?