Sims Learning Connections

Prompted by the comment thread on my previous post and Friday’s Boston KM Forum 5 October breakfast meeting that continued the knowledge mapping conversation, I threw down a very preliminary graphic to illustrate the knowledge management / learning domain as it exists in (until now) my head — a concept map of sorts, but not rigorously to that form.

All the ovals somehow relate to creating, discovering, and/or sharing information and/or knowledge and so in some sense could be said to be under a broad umbrella of “knowledge management.”

Further notes:

• 15 October update, prompted by feedback in comments here and at Jay Cross’s first alternative view: When viewing the ovals, mentally insert “the methods and goals of…” in front of each name. For example, not the physical intranet, but rather “the methods of intranet design and goals of an intranet.” This is my dodge to attempt normalize to a common ‘class’ as Harold Jarche correctly noted in comments at Informal Learning Blog that the ovals, as short-labeled, “are not in the same class (e.g. informal learning & library of science).” If this additional explanation helps, great; and apologies in advance if I’m just digging myself deeper into a hole. At this point, I’m willing to ‘write off’ the diagram as a failed attempt.
• Jay’s second alternative view gets closer to what I was reaching for here, where the focus of the various disciplines are what is called out.
• The relative size of the ovals have no significance
• The proximity to other ovals does have significance in indicating “relatedness” or “is a sub-set of”
• The blue ovals are higher-level concepts than the pale yellow ovals, which in-turn are higher-level concepts than the gray ovals
• Because this was already getting so crowded, I didn’t try to be exhaustive with terms, rather illustrative. For example, I could have included ‘Document Management’ and/or ‘Records Management’ as distinct from Content Management
• Apologies in advance to Organizational Development (OD) and Library of Science professionals as I have glommed on your entire rich disciplines as just one more blue oval amongst other frankly lessor concepts. For OD I considered placing the discipline instead as a bullet in the “Supported by” list…and yet, it also seems closer to the ovals than the remaining bullets in that list. For Library of Science, like knowledge management’s relationship to Learning, I believe this is a discipline working to the same ends, although at least historically using somewhat different methods or channels. Certainly the KM profession has already benefited greatly from the many individuals coming from a Library of Science background — whereas the cross-pollination with Learning, and even more so OD, and Innovation, is more emergent.
• I briefly thought about trying to place the ovals on a x-y axis where the dimensions were some choice of:
  • static (explicit) versus flow (sharing),
  • technology versus people centered, or
  • individual versus organizational scale

  Perhaps an exercise for another day?

I’m interested in hearing from others regarding:

1. where your own mental model either aligns with or is different from this map
2. pointers to other existing examples of visual mapping of this landscape (or your newly created one) — I haven’t yet made the time for my own literature search on this one

16 October Update: Today in trying to catch-up with some of my own blog reading, I discovered Jack Vinson’s recent post The knowledge management jigsaw puzzle that builds on Lucas McDonnell’s 59 categorized pieces of knowledge management. Refer to Lucas’ original list to better understand the intended meaning of some of the blocks in the diagram and the later summary, especially the comments.

I like the attempt at categorization, especially including describing the domain by the issues it attempts to solve — I hadn’t thought of that approach, but should have. If I was going to work with this further I might even do a decomposition from higher-level business issues down to the lower-level issues that are in knowledge management terminology (e.g. absence of shared vocabulary). The items in Issues, more than the other categories, are at different granularities (e.g. ‘Innovation’ and ‘Intellectual Capital’ as very high-level issues that involve more than just knowledge management, and conversely ‘Findability’ that is pretty squarely in KM alone)

To the Methods category I would add Communities and Networks, as I believe these are distinct from Collaboration.

To the Technology category I would add “collaboration infrastructure” either as one block or by its individual pieces of email, team workspaces, web-conferencing, etc. I would also likely remove ‘Web 2.0′ as it is a vague term that overlaps with Wiki and Blog, but then I would add ’social bookmarking’. Might want to include some reference to enterprise application databases and data warehouse, at least as some sort of noted dependency.