…or why I would sometimes like to place my colleagues at work in front of a few selected videos that will help them understand why we urgently need to rethink our knowledge management strategy (or even better: develope a strategy!):
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Do you have any idea how hard it is to explain the future of the web (and how we can actively contribute to it by positioning our ideas/products) to non-techies?
This may be due to my bad rhetorics (e.g. speaking too fast), but still – another colleague told me the other day: “Oh, I think we shouldn’t put too much energy in knowledge management, but instead implement more projects”. – “No!”, I immediately replied, “I believe that a better distribution of our knowledge and approaches will also contribute to the dissemination of the basic idea we’re already giving out for free” (here: sustainable sanitation concepts).
I mean, they are still only relying on Google to search for interesting information (and are consequently overhelmed by the following information overload) while I am already relying on social bookmarking services (e.g. delicious.com), (CC)-by-sa licenced photo sharing websites (e.g. flickr.com) and blogs to find qualified (= pre-selected by human beings) materials we can use for our mission.
A lot of ppl out there constantly create great content without really thinking about how they could actually share it with the rest of the world. If you want your works to be found online, you’ll have to do something about it and not just put it somewhere on the internet and hope that Google will index it one day.
The world would be so much better if all scientist who publish their works online could just index it somewhere on delicious & co. The other day, someone even asked me if Google could come up with a dedicated service for his special topic…. WTH? – “Go and tag your works at delicious.com”, I replied, “and your files may remain on your server and thus generate even more traffic for you”.
Give them more semantic value!
I would encourage you to read “Crossing the Chasm” by Geoffrey Moore. I would also encourage you to look at Everett Rogers, pioneer of the “diffusion of innovation” theory. That might help in developing communication strategies, to get your non-techie colleagues on the same page. It is a process.
BTW, there is a job title mostly used in the tech community, evangelist. Apple pioneered this role by studying Billy Graham. Look, outside the tech community for communication models, don’t bang against the proverbial wall, or reinvent the wheel.
Hey… thank you very much for these book recommendations – quite interesting! And yes, I urgently need to develope a communication strategy – have already tried to keep things simple. It feels like they are just rejecting technology (as engineers!) and at the same time want their online stuff to improve.
For instance, I’ve already told them about Guy Kawasaki’s 10/20/30 rule (1o slides, 20 minutes, 30px font), but they keep on producing presentations with 40 slides, micro-tiny font and just too much information which can of course never be presented within 20 minutes.