10 Principles for KM Success

When an end-user has a computer issues in my experience 9 times out of 10 it's the end of the world. When they place that first call to any help desk they want a zero touch solution as fast as possible. What better tool for a help desk agent to have access to than a highly organized knowledge base, having a large number of articles with common issues. This can only improve the number of zero touch solutions. Self-service is much better than standard service...to a point. The experience you gain from trying to solve your problems can be turned into a great deal knowledge; but you can only try and self-serve for so long. I find that if I am not presented with enough information, to help myself I will go looking for help. The best way for DePaul students to become better-do-it-yourself-ers, is to integrate KM into current technologies. This will allow users to come more familiar with it.

Learning Management Systems

A start to my Wiki Contribution Learning Management Systems

What I want to learn from this course?

When I first signed up for this course I was only thinking about KMS through Wiki's and was eager to learn more about creating and formatting articles for Collaboration tools such as Wiki-Media and Confluence. As a matter fact the department I work for has started to use more and more group collaboration tools. After, watching the first couple of classes it occurred to me that some of the sources I use on a daily basis can be considered KMS, Digg for example. So for the rest of the quarter I am looking forward into gaining new information that I can turn into knowledge; which I can use to enhance my daily work and personal experiences. After all knowledge is power.

Knowledge and Information

Knowledge is defined as (i) facts, information, and skills acquired by a person through experience or education; the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject, (ii) what is known in a particular field or in total; facts and information or (iii) awareness or familiarity gained by experience of a fact or situation.

Information is the result of processing, manipulating and organizing data in a way that adds to the knowledge of the receiver. In other words, it is the context in which data is taken.

To me the difference lies here; information is nothing more than data that has been presented to you or you have collected, knowledge is what you gain from experiencing and working with the information that is given to you.