Recently, I had a conversation with Brandon Hall . We discussed that the dual global forces of outsourcing and downsizing have created immediate needs to spontaneously reconfigure knowledge flows. My assertion is that this change, in turn, has shattered many organizations' linear, hierarchical training models. Instead of lessons leading to courses, leading to tracks, leading to certifications, we now are in a world that requires real time knowledge.
By this, I mean that when you move your call center from Peoria to New Delhi, you create an instant need for process and product knowledge somewhere where that information and those processes do not now exist. Further, when you assemble a fresh team to tackle a technical problems, you may be collaborating with people you haven't worked with before, lack key knowledge of your development processes, and use different toolsets than you. Business Collaboration Wikis, like Jotspot seem designed to allow you to create, ad hoc, your own work spaces and views of multiple data sources. (I hope to write more about Jotspot in the future -- I've requested to be a Beta user of their product.)
But to support this transition of work flow (from intensive, local to dispersed and remote), not just work flows, but knowledge, information and process flows must be supple. Information needed to accomplish the work must be accessed when needed in just the right increment. To this end, I was talking this last week with Shyam Subramanyan and Jeet Vaidya, President and Founder, respectively, of Mentorware. We discussed this trend toward increasingly shorter and more modular, extremely dense multi-sensory nuggets of information -- targeted highly toward an immediate (versus long term) need.
Since that conversation, I have been wondering -- how can BC Wikis merge with this extremely modular learning approach? We are familiar with "Googling" a topic to become an instant expert. (Oh dear, have I just "nouned" a verb?) How can we, similarly, Google a skill or knowledge set, and assemble it, on the fly as part of a BC Wiki? Shouldn't you be able to assemble the dense knowledge nuggets you need to support your task, as part of your BC Wiki, just like you would add other resources or data?
Comments