This article presents an interview with Mike Zisman, who is the executive vice president for strategy at Lotus Development and vice president of strategy for parent company IBM. He is the IBM groupthink guru and he is leaning towards a new instant messaging and knowledge management system in his firm. He spends most of his time exploring knowledge management and collaborative communications. When asked how he thinks the traditional messaging and groupware market will pick up out of its maturation phase, he answered that messaging is something people need these days and so the market is moving in a new direction. The focus is more on solving problems in the collaborative market and real-time messaging, which yields knowledge management. He then describes knowledge management with a quote, stating that it is best explained as, “HP would be better off if HP knew what HP knew.” He defines it as consisting of a whole set of technologies, the five key ones being business intelligence, collaboration, distributed learning, knowledge discovery and mapping, and expertise location. (Some of these match up with the knowledge management values in chapter 11.) He states that technology plays a major role in knowledge management, but it would be futile without it. Just as we learned in chapter 11, knowledge management requires the recognition that a firm’s core processes need to be changed; throwing out technologies will not solve any problems. The real-time collaboration market that deals with pure messaging has peaked according to Zisman, and customers now want to see messaging-based collaboration. The resulting collaboration products have proven to be successful; he uses it himself in his company and is able to instant message anyone in the company. Using a browser, he can go to a website and click on a meeting and work with the members in the meeting, which eliminates the need for travel. The future holds directly embedding the collaboration tools into applications, and the integration of this into other IBM units is something to look forward to as well.
Reference:
Songini, Mark. (1999). What’s Beyond Groupware? Retrieved from PC World on May 22, 2009.
Website: http://www.pcworld.com/article/13198/whats_beyond_groupware.html
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If he only knew the impact of IM today. I like how Zisman refers to Knowledge Management as a whole set of technologies. I think many people think of it as just moving and housing the fishished data. I never thought about the collaboration part of it until now.
ReplyDeleteOn that collaboration idea....My department has just decided to create our own internal wiki page so that we can all be exposed to eachother's experimental results and contribute to their interpretation. Before this, we would simply store their data (wherever they wanted) and share it with their managers only. Now, everyone is exposed to all data; hopefully we can be better at turning that information into knowledge!
ReplyDeleteSimilar to what Jacob has said, the company that I am working for just created a knowledge base, where everyone can post and share knowledge with one another. Throughout the office and throughout the business world, the new buzz world is "knowledge management", just like "continuous improvement" in the past.
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