Blockchain Papers

Ulrich Schmitt

Just like the personal computer revolution, it is possible that Knowledge Management (KM) will in the 21 century experience a decentralizing revolution that gives more power and autonomy to individuals and selforganized groups. Seven decades after Vannevar Bush’s still unfulfilled vision of the Memex. Levy’s scenario stresses the dire need to provide overdue support tools for knowledge workers in our Knowledge Societies, not at the expense of Organizational KM Systems, but rather as the means to foster a fruitful co-evolution. With a prototype system addressing these issues about to be converted into a viable Personal KM system (PKMS), the author follows up on recent publications and considers the impact and potential of a novel memebased approach aiming to aid individuals throughout their academic and professional life and as contributors and beneficiaries of organizational performance and in light of the anticipated next generation of KM systems. 1 A NEXT GENERATION OF KM The first generation of Knowledge Management (KM) has been described as the capturing, storing, and reusing of existing knowledge including “systems of managing knowledge like company yellow pages, experts outlining processes they are involved in, creating learning communities where employees/customers share their knowledge, creating information systems for documenting and storing knowledge, and so on. These first-generation KM initiatives were about viewing knowledge as the foremost strategic asset, measuring it, capturing it, storing it, and protecting it. They were about treating knowledge as an asset, recognizing how it influences strategy, and wanting to make the most of it by managing it properly” (Pasher & Ronen 2011). The second KM generation needs to focus on creating new knowledge and innovation, a process which starts with the “reuse or new use of existing knowledge, adding an invention, and then creating a new product or service that exploits this invention.” This process requires creativity and the awareness that old knowledge becomes obsolete. For reaping the appropriate rewards, it is essential to systematically exploit the knowledge captured and created (Pasher & Ronen 2011). In reviewing a wider range of features for the ‘Next KM Generation’ (suggested by Sveiby, Wiig, Snowdon, McElroy, Ponzi, Miles, St Onge, Allee), the identified seven key themes prioritize confirm this need, but also strongly emphasize the personal and social nature of knowledge (Grant 2008). 1.1 The Personal KM Agenda Despite these accentuations and in contrast to Organizational KM (OKM), Personal KM (PKM) has been placed historically in a narrow individualistic confinement (Cheong & Tsui 2011b). In limiting its scope, PKM has been labelled as sophisticated career and life management with a core focus on personal enquiry (Pauleen & Gorman 2011) or as a means to improve some skills or capabilities of individuals (Davenport 2011), negating its importance relating to group member performance, business processes, or new technologies. This state surprises in light of prominent past suggestions to develop a ‘Memex’ for making one’s “intellectual excursions more enjoyable” (Bush 1945), to offer assistance in allocating one’s “attention efficiently among the [emerging] overabundance of information sources” (Simon 1971), or to provide adequate organizational leadership for building, connecting, and energizing dynamic knowledge-creating environments and their expansion (Nonaka 2000). As a result, PKM remains “a real and pressing problem”, and Bush's dream of a ‘Memex’ has yet to be fully realized on a wide scale (Davies 2011). Appropriately, Wiig argues for shifting the focus of KM toward strengthening the ability of people for enabling them to act in the best interest of their enterprise and its desired strategies and performance (Wiig 2004). In this context, PKM needs more appropriately to be regarded as a bottom-up approach to KM (Pollard 2008), as opposed to the more traditional, top-down Organizational KM. As such, PKM also “goes beyond Personal Information Management” (PIM) which focusses predominantly on information processing without the emphasis on creating new knowledge (Cheong & Tsui 2011a). But, although there are many PKM tools available, “they are not integrated with each other”, and the “currently available PKM systems can provide only a partial support to knowledge workers” (Osis 2011). “While today we have many powerful applications for locating vast amounts of digital information, we lack effective tools for selecting, structuring, personalizing, and making sense of the digital resources available to us” (Kahle 2009). Meanwhile, the organizational, commercial, social and legal innovations driven by technological progress and economic pressures continue to have profound impacts. Work has suffered from a process of fragmentation which will continue to accelerate. Its implications include one’s slipping control over constant interruptions, the loss of time for real concentration, and less learning by observation and reflection (Gratton 2011). With specializations and domain-specific knowledge on the rise, peoples’ identification has shifted from their company to their profession, and vertical hierarchies and traditional career ladders have been replaced by sideways career moves between companies and a horizontal labour market (Florida 2012). The ‘Future of Employment’ study estimates 47% of the current US employment to be still at risk due to recent technological breakthroughs able to turn previously non-routine tasks into well-defined problems susceptible to computerization (Frey & Osborne 2013). What is overdue is in the opinion of the author – an innovative PKM technology to provide the means for life-long-learning, resourcefulness, creative authorship and teamwork throughout an individual’s academic and professional life and for his/her role as contributor and beneficiary of organizational and societal performance. It needs to support the notion that knowledge and skills of knowledge workers are portable and mobile and with it their options on where, how, and for whom they will put their knowledge to work. 1.2 Intents and Barriers to Overcome In Wiig’s opinion (2011), individuals need to be highly knowledgeable not only to function competently as part of the workforce, but also in their daily lives and as public citizens: “In a society with broad personal competences, decision-making everywhere will maximize personal goals, provide effective public agencies and governance, make commerce and industry competitive, and ensure that personal and family decisions and actions will improve societal functions and Quality of Life.” But, “for better performance, people must [also] be provided with resources and opportunities to do their best. They need knowledge and understanding as well as motivation and supportive attitudes.” Such resources may well be autonomous PKM capacities, networked in continuous feedback loops, where individuals are able to determine how their expertise will be used or exchanged with people, communities, or organizations close to them. Levy (2011) expects such systems nourished by the creative conversation of the many networked PKM devices to assume an elementary role that enables the emergence of the distributed processes of collective intelligence, which in turn feed them. Accordingly, he sketches a scenario which stresses the vital role of future education “to encourage in students the sustainable growth of autonomous capacities in PKM” and which envisages KM to experience “a decentralizing revolution that gives more power and autonomy to individuals and self-organized groups” (Levy 2011). Although the author concurs that PKM Systems (PKMS) are destined to become potent drivers of human development (Schmitt 2014b), an enabling technological environment benefitting such a novel solution is presently facing severe barriers wasting individuals’ time and efforts (Schmitt 2014f). The remedies have been summed up into five provisions: 1. Digital personal and personalized knowledge is always in the possession and at the personal disposal of its owner or eligible co-worker, residing in personal hardware or personalized cloud-databases. 2.