KM in our CAREER

How can we apply what we are learning in this course to our careers???

• Identify the various aspects of my day-to-day work life in which Knowledge Management has relevance.
• Engage in a constant process of knowledge capturing, sharing and creation to meet these demands of my work.
• Promote such KM practices within the organization; starting from colleagues within one’s department and gradually reaching out to the whole organization.
• Be supporter of KM in organization by embracing and encouraging fellow colleagues to share K
• Provide quality contributions and not to ineffective of inputs into K-portals
• Remain active in social media to be kept abreast of what's happening and establish social networks
• Introducing the tools to others in the workplace can also help to improve the workflow since many jobs these days work in project teams – e.g. use of wikis for collaboration and generation of ideas.
• Identifying the roadblocks to knowledge management in organizations. If the company is facing a problem with transferring knowledge, or even transferring information across departments, sharing the ideas learnt through this course might enhance overall organizational efficiency.

How can knowledge sharing and creation enhance our personal innovative capabilities?

"Knowledge sharing enables me to share what I know that others do not with them. At the same time, this would mean other people will be able share their tacit knowledge with me through externalization. I see this as a two-way form of enhancing personal innovation capabilities whereby both parties benefit; by acquiring new set of skills and knowledge and by learning from past experiences or mistakes encountered by others. This would in turn lead to new knowledge being created. One would be better able to tackle an issue with ease after gaining new insights on it. This increases competencies and enhance personal innovative capabilities."


"Knowledge sharing and creation enhances both the quantity and quality of one’s existing knowledge base. Thus, increases one’s ability to recombine existing knowledge in novel ways. Knowledge sharing and creation also widens one’s field of knowledge. This increases one’s capacity to think out the box by providing one with a more diverse range of knowledge from which to combine and create innovations."

- Stimulates new thinking which may lead to knowledge creation/enhancement

- Mutual learning and benefits

- Enhance personal self in actions and thinking

- Widen social network to establish people contacts for future uses

Tool #4 - PDF

Want to share your knowledge without losing credit for it or control over it? The Adobe Acrobat is the solution. Adobe Acrobat allows you to create documents that are in Portable Document Format (PDF), which allows you to control whether they can be printed, altered or marked-up.

This tool is especially useful when you want to share reports among your friends without worrying that they might just copy and paste your work.

Another tool that complements the use of Adobe Acrobat is a open source freeware known as PDF995. The virtual-printer software enables users to convert any documents into PDF format by “printing” it into PDF. For example, you might want to share your PowerPoint slides with your friends while keeping the formatting intact (we all know how irritating it is when the formatting changes when we share ppt files). You can use PDF995 to convert the ppt file into a pdf file and sent it without worrying about the changes in formatting.

These freeware are easily downloadable online and here are the links to download them:
Adobe Acrobat – http://www.adobe.com
PDF995 – http://www.pdf995.com

Tool #3 - Google's Desktop Search (Personal KM Tool)

Google Desktop makes searching your computer as easy as searching the web with Google. It's a desktop search application that provides full text search over your email, files, music, photos, chats, Gmail, web pages that you've viewed, and more. By making your computer searchable, Desktop puts your information easily within your reach and frees you from having to manually organize your files, emails and bookmarks.

Google Desktop doesn't just help you search your computer; it also helps you gather new information from the web and stay organized with gadgets and sidebar. Google Gadgets can be placed anywhere on your desktop to show you new email, weather, photos, personalized news, and more. Sidebar is a vertical bar on your desktop that helps you keep your gadgets organized.

Key Benefits:

1) Useful results
Results provide all relevant information, including file name, brief snippet with search terms highlighted. Able to filter for particular type of items and preview search results inside the browser.

2) Smart indexing
One-time indexing of email, files and web history to enable desktop search. Indexing is run automatically to be constantly updated.

3) Finding deleted files
Creates and store cached copies of files and items each time you view them, in computer’s hard drive. Thus, can use Desktop to find items accidentally deleted instead of re-creating!!

4) Multiple file types
Google Desktop automatically indexes, and allows you to search the full text over many applications such as Microsoft Office (Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint), Internet Explorer, MSN/AOL Instant Messenger, PDF and etc. , the following types of items on your computer

You can read more here and even better,
you can GET the application here!

Tool #2 - Skype

Skype allows people from different countries to interact on a real-time basis. This would facilitate personal innovation by allowing the transferring of ideas across geographic borders! Say for instance, my friend over in the United States has just discovered a new software that allows me to better organize my lecture notes or has even discovered a new method of cooking a dish. He or she would be able to transmit that knowledge to me over Skype, aided with the use of the web-camera which will allow me to see how the software is used or how the dish is cooked. It is almost as if I was REALLY there!

A few users conversing over Skype will help to improve efficiency by capturing different ideas simultaneously and pushing it out to the other team mates fast. For example, if I’m working on a project which requires a video shoot and we are trying to find locations for the perfect place to shoot, several members of the team can actually scout out different areas at the same time while using the webcam to display the respective areas to the other members at other places. This will reduce the time taken for the team to travel to all places together and makes work faster.

However, one challenge that Skype poses would be the ‘lag-time’, especially when using the webcam. It makes conferencing kind of a hindrance and it feels funny to see the other part always staring at the webcam because he/she is trying to establish eye contact while the other party stares at the screen. Although the webcam adds a little more personal touch, the overall effect is still far from great.

Tool #1 - YouTube

YouTube is a video sharing website where users can upload, view and share video clips. Unregistered users can watch most videos on the site, while registered users are permitted to upload an unlimited number of videos.

In this case, knowledge is captured and shared in the form of visual media. Most people are attracted to visuals, be it still pictures or motion pictures, rather than wordy text. Thus, people are more inclined towards watching a video clip than to read a report that documents the same amount of information. Moreover, a video would better illustrate a point than having the reader to mentally visualize the same point from words.

Hence, YouTube is an effective and efficient medium to share and showcase your own innovative capabilities. Viewers can even respond by posting a video clip or by leaving comments on what they have seen.

The Assignment

Our class exercise dealt with thinking (very hard) and coming up with reasons on WHY and HOW Knowledge Management has become so vital.

1. Critically assess, certain tools you could use for enabling “personal knowledge management” so as to speed up your own innovative capabilities.

2. How can knowledge sharing and creation enhance your personal innovative capabilities?