TechKnowledgy

Dave Pollard has an excellent post which describes the need for a new department which “would have not only the traditional responsibilities for managing the financial, HR and sales systems and the centralized and desktop hardware of the organization, but also these new responsibilities”:

Development of new social software tools for front-line employees, including:
– Expertise locators – to help people find other people inside and outside the organization they need to talk with to do their job more effectively
– Personal content management tools – simple, weblog-type tools that organize, access and selectively publish each individual’s ‘filing cabinet’
– Personal collaboration tools – wireless, portable videoconferencing and networking tools that save travel costs and allow people to participate virtually in events where they cannot afford to participate in person
– Research bibilography and canvassing tools – technologies and templates that enable effective do-it-yourself business research and analysis and facilitate the preparation of professional reports and presentations, and

Hands-on assistance to front-line employees — helping them make effective use of technology and knowledge, including the above tools, one-on-one, in the context of their individual roles. Not training, not wait-for-the-phone-to-ring help desk service — face to face, scheduled sessions where individuals can show what they do and what they know, and experts can show them how to do it better, faster, and take the intelligence of what else is needed back to HO so developers can improve effectiveness even more.

McGee has a nice accompanying graphic which discusses push and pull inefficiences in knowledge management.

The focus: on improving individual and group productivity, out of which comes enterprise productivity.