Week 4 – Discussion and Articles

One of the main items I took away from week 4 is an introduction to some pretty nifty information capturing and storing software. Mindmapper was pretty cool but I have to say I would probably never use that software in my lifetime. Microsoft Office Onenote on the other hand did get my attention. I downloaded the software and installed it on my personal PC and I have to say, it is rather excellent. I’m one of those students that creates a new folder for the current term and within that folder I place sub-folders for each course I am taking. Within each course folder I add folders for weeks, assignments, midterm, and final. I basically follow this same process at work and at home for my media collection. It is my way of keeping organized. Onenote somewhat captures what I do manually into a software package. I found it fairly easy to use with no learning curve and till now fairly useful. I will keep using it till I find that my old way is more affective or till I find something better.

I have to be honest, I never really put too much thought behind the process of capturing Knowledge, Capture, Structure, Store, Codify, Disseminate, Integrate, Use and finally regenerate. In my current company we use a portal mainly for its KM and collaboration functionality. We use what SAP calls collaboration rooms to store company information and make it available to those with authorization. The portal does basically follow most of these processes. It captures information and provides some structure when it stores it. It then disseminates the information to the entire organization, or those that should have access to it anyway. Use these tools have had an enormous impact on the company. One thing worth mentioning though is since most organization always look at the bottom line (how much does it cost) before investing in these software packages, Knowledge Management software I found is not the easiest to sell. It is rather difficult to capture a solid ROI.

Last but not least I would like to mention PKM or Personal Knowledge Management. I guess I indirectly spoke about it earlier when I mentioned how I structure my folders to capture different information. PKM is just another one of those terms that you never really think about but just do. We all use PKM whether we are aware of it or not. After years of trial and error I am pretty much set in my ways on how I go about learning new things and how I retain that knowledge.


7 things you should know about… Wikis

Yes I’ve used Wikis before, in today’s age who hasn’t stumbled across Wikipedia once or twice. I do have to admit though that I never really thought about what a Wiki really consisted of. For those who really don’t know what a wiki is this article is a fast, easy read that does a fairly decent job of describing Wikis.