Context & Connection

At KMWorld 2008, Dave Pollard presented an updated slideshare of a previous presentation. It highlights the themes of "Context" and "Connectivity." These two themes characterize an emerging group of capabilities that address Complex decision making contexts, a deficiency in traditional analytically-oriented KM tools, concepts, and frameworks.

The title of his presentation is “From Content to Context and from Collection to Connection.”

• Content-to-Context – traditional KM focuses on the capture, creation, and provisioning of content as a formal artifact. Pollard’s summary is “acquire > add value (& store) > disseminate”, and “Know-what, Collection, Content, Just-in-case.” This implies that the key challenge is the identification, specification, design, capture, and management of relatively generic chunks of content for future consumption by a decision maker. These chunks are assumed to be relevant to a wide range of decision contexts; thereby justifying the investment in formally capturing them and provisioning them for future consumption. And, the (often tacit) assumption is that there is a low barrier to entry for most consumers of these chunks. Anyone who’s tried to design content for future consumption knows that (a) creating content that is really used across a wide range of contexts is surprisingly difficult, and (b) locating, filtering, and fitting pre-provisioned content to a decision context is a lot more work for the decision maker than the casual observer might think.The new focus is on the consumption context. This implies that the key challenge is primarily how the decision maker locates and incorporates relevant content into a decision context. A key emerging aspect of this is to (a) provision content for findability and mashability, and (b) provide services that allow the decision maker to easily match content to context (and vice versa).
• Collection-to-Connection – as mentioned above, traditional KM focused on the collection of content. Shifting the focus to “Connection” emphasizes connecting the decision maker to resources that are relevant to the decision context. Pollard’s summary is “scan > make sense (& connect/canvas) > publish”, and “Know-who, Connection, Context, Just-in-time.” It’s not a bad summary, but his diagrams of scanning and canvassing have a strangely Content/Collection flavor to them…or maybe Dave Snowden has just made me allergic to anything that looks like categorization/analysis in a Complex context…:-)

Anyway, if you’re looking for a perspective on Ordered vs. Complex contexts that’s less academic than Snowden, this slideshare’s worth a look.