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Getting to the Root of Knowledge Management Problems

By Tom Davenport

August 01, 2003 — CIO — Solving the problems of knowledge worker productivity and performance is a daunting prospect, so it makes sense to start with the most simplistic approach to research I know—studying...me. I’ve been known to develop enormous insights about others just by looking at my own problems and approaches. And, as any good Buddhist will tell you, observing oneself is the path to enlightenment. I’m not a Buddhist, mind you, but that’s OK since my aims are more modest than enlightenment: I’m only shooting for a little sanity.

Like everybody else these days, I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed by my own personal information and knowledge environment. I have lots of electronic devices—it seems like a lot to me, anyway. For these purposes, I’m intentionally ignoring the devices my family uses, for which I am the first-line (if somewhat reluctant and ineffective) provider of technical support. For my own use, I have a desktop PC at home, a laptop PC that travels with me, a PDA and a typical cell phone. None of them communicates very well with each other (though my PDA, for example, communicates reasonably well with my wife’s and my assistant’s PCs), and I occasionally have to send e-mails from one device to another as if they were distant cousins. I know they could be made to communicate better with each other, but I don’t have time to figure it out, and frankly I am grateful if they are all just working.

E-mail has become the core of my information flow, but I get too much of it. I have four addresses, which get forwarded into two different e-mail clients. I know that isn’t ideal, but if you work with multiple organizations, you tend to have multiple e-mail identities. A couple of those identities I access only at home, which makes my response time to them slow, but it keeps me sane.

Today I got 72 e-mails through one account and 29 through another, for a total of 101. About a third (a much higher fraction on weekends) were from spammers, which I am coming to believe are the lowest form of life on the planet. I sent out 32 messages during the day. I did all this through a broadband connection in my hotel—pretty cool—and it only cost me $12.95 and the hour I wasted trying to get connected to it. I finally called the front desk for help, and the attendant told me that it wasn’t working but I should keep wasting my time trying to connect because it would probably be working soon.

 

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