One of the aims of my KTP project, which ends today, was to look at knowledge management systems for small teams. Every day we’re exposed, through email, tweets, blog posts, news and research, to hundreds of snippets of information. But how do we get hold of them when we need them?
Knowledge management is a process that can be put in place to store, keep, retrieve and share knowledge in a useful way. When developing knowledge management it is useful to put a system in place where those who wish to share knowledge and collaborate can access, files, thoughts and ideas in a central organised location. The creation of such a system can be very costly, even using off the shelf technologies.
We set out to create a cost effective system, a prototype, to test the usefulness of knoweldge management across a small team at my placement (and which included the team at BCU).
Wikis and collaborative google docs could be used in this way, but they are quite hard work – ideally we need something that is easy to add to and something which is easy to search. We looked to Evernote for the answer.
Why we chose Evernote
- Evernote can be used across a number of platforms – it has native apps for Mac, PC, Android, and iOS, plus a web interface which makes it as near as universal as we will get.
- In Evernote you can easily clip articles and paste them to a shared notebook for others to see.
- It has text recognition software built in so images and scans with text can be searched.
- Content can be tagged and have meta data applied, greatly helping search and allowing data to be gathered easily into groups.
- We can do all this on a shoestring: one premium account costs $45 – that account can share a notebook with all the members of the team. Team members can use a free account to access the shared notebook, contributing and retrieving information from a communal database.
It is certainly in my opinion worth trying out Evernote for knowledge management within an organisation. It’s easy to use and could provide a company with competative advantage against others, after all, knowledge is a valuable asset.
I think that you’re mistaking a good tool with a real solution. Your praise for Evernote as a KM tool implicitly assumes that the problem in organizational KM is being able to easily and inexpensively gather snippets of knowledge in real time and add them to a central repository. Nope. This hasn’t been much of a challenge since the dawn of email and easy open-source software to support groups and communities.
You write that “content can be tagged and have meta data applied…” but neglect to suggest who will do this, when they’ll do it, how well they’ll do it, etc.
Without that key step you can every bit of knowledge online and searchable (Google currently offers a reasonable facsimile of this function) and still not effectively manage the knowledge within an organization.
Thanks for the comment.
Those who add can tag, and those who read can tag to, and that’s what we were aiming for.
You seem to suggest that this activity is pointless because content is already indexed and available through searches on the wider WWW. Sure Google is a great place to get at knowledge, but that knowledge is broad and generalised; this small scale pilot into knowledge management allowed us to capture what happens after we have filtered and then to apply meaning through our own tags to aid retrieval. This was knowledge management for a particular context, designed as such.
We never thought that this would be the ultimate solution to knowledge management for a small group of people (although, you know, it might actually be a pretty robust way of doing things). As mentioned in the post, we are aware that there are other solutions out there we can take off the shelf, there are of course also bespoke solutions and really good, interesting experts who can be recruited to set up these systems. We were more interested in seeing if this idea of knowledge management could be useful to this group and if it could help to collect the stuff they were already engaging with. Here at BCMCR we like to find simple ways of exploring ideas before committing partners to more expensive solutions – by choosing something low cost and running a prototype solution we can test the idea, test the fit with working practices and then signpost where the partners should go next if they need something more robust.
@Jon Hickman
I’m sorry, my comment misled. No, I’m not suggesting the Google solution would be as good as semantically-tagged content. Only that content without tags is what we have already available via Google.
My point was strictly on the challenge of getting anyone to actually tag. They should; they could. They don’t; they wont.