In the course of this week's P3O Practitioner event, we touched on how portfolio, programme and project offices could support Knowledge Management, how these people could support programme and project managers put their hands on the right material and the right time. This sparked an interesting discussion around 'taxonomy', search engines and other tools.
The challenge for busy programme and project managers is this: how do you find valuable stuff within the organisation quickly? When it comes to enterprises of any size, it's not what you know that counts, but how quickly it can be appropriately mobilised; how you can recall and apply it quickly.
Knowledge in this sense, does no good if it is permanently lost in the labyrinth of some corporate server. When was the last time you were frustrated that you simply could not find a particular file that you knew you had and you needed 'to hand'? A lot of lost time and frustration can accumulate in that way.
Then I came across this article - Taxonomy Fairy Tales - in Patrick Lambe's excellent Green Cameleon Blog. It contains a fascinating video discussion between Patrick in Dublin and Matt Moore in Sydney.
The conversation didn't just focus on the potentially abstract and arid idea of taxonomies, but also gave me some fresh insights into why the Google approach probably won't work on most intranets for such knowledge management purposes, on the whole subject of Governance, and on the use of Experts in this context.
I liked the conclusion around the part of the conversation on Experts: that the actual practitioners should work out classifications empirically, from experience and then ask for help. This links with my growing belief on finding internal examples of best practice, the 'Bright Spots' as Dan and Chip Heath call them.
Recommended.