Tag: PKM

Create – the fifth C and the humane digital workplace

This is the sixth post on my journey towards working with a humane digital workplace. It started with “Building a humane digital workplace” (listing the 5 Cs) and was followed up with “Connect“, “Communicate“, “Collaborate“ and “Coach“.

The fifth and final C is Create, and the 30.000 feet overview of our intent with Create is that we:

  • Are responsive, adaptive and open to new ideas
  • Dare to do things differently
  • Challenge the traditional ways of working
  • Come up with continuous improvements

Over the years, all companies change and create new ways of working. The idea here, is to being in charge of these changes, instead of only letting the outside world demand them from you. And these new, creative ways of working don’t always need to be revolutionary. For example, upgrading to a very well functioning intranet can make paper forms and administrative tasks a distant memory. Virtual teams distributed in time and space can work together, complementing traditional structures. And by introducing tools such as Yammer, we can replace some of the dark silos created by e-mail.

As a customer oriented company, we also constantly see if there are new ways to innovate. Also here, it is not always about revolutionizing everything at once. Rather, we constantly make sure our processes, tools, and skills evolve. Here, I also come back to the people that inspire me to do more and better:

  • Use Working Out Loud by John Stepper to bring ideas in to the open, and see where they take us.
  • Be inspired by other ways than e-mail to collaborate thanks to Luis Suárez, and others.
  • Use the current methods for communicating internally and externally thanks to experts like Rachel Miller and Gloria Lombardi.
  • Don’t journey alone. Let the Digital Workplace Group (DWG) and their friends guide you in modern ways of working.
  • With a new world comes a new way of learning. Let Harold Jarche and others guide you on this journey.
  • Collaboration is at the center of everything we do, as Oscar Berg and others clearly emphasize.

Now, the next step is to make sure we truly bridge the 5 Cs with the ideas from the digital workplace domain. The goal remains: Creating a humane digital workplace, based on our values and culture.

My Personal Knowledge Mastery tools

More and more is written on the subject Personal Knowledge Mastery  (PKM), such as Harold Jarche‘s site and PKM link collection, and blog posts like this week’s What is Personal Knowledge Management? Harold has also collected a great set of tools others use for their Personal Knowledge Mastery.

Inspired by Sumeet Moghe‘s blog post Here’s how I’m approaching Personal Knowledge Management, I decided to list the tools and processes I use to handle my own Personal Knowledge Mastery. I just started doing this in a structured way, so the tools and processes will change. This is, however, where I stand today:

Step One: Seek

– As for Sumeet Moghe, Google Reader Feedly and Twitter are my foremost collection methods. To make things even easier, I connect my Google Reader account to FeedDemon thanks to its ability to save “Watches”, i.e. saved searches. I prefer to access Twitter via HootSuite, thanks to the great UI. Lots of opportunities to structure feeds via tabs gives me more than enough to look through.

Step Two: Sense

– I skim through all new postings 2-3 times a day, and when I want to save something and tag it so I can find it again, I send the links to Delicious Evernote. When I see some trends emerging, or I sense that two or more areas should be connected, I use Microsoft’s OneNote at work and Dropbox Google Drive privately to save my writings in the cloud.

Step Three: Share 

– My primary ways of sharing, except for structured and casual meetings at work, are my twitter account and this blog. I use WordPress on my site, thanks to its ease-of-use.

It would be interesting to hear more about what tools and processes other use. The more we share about this, the better we can make sense of the constant flow of information that surrounds us.