Last update: 14-02-2009 12:26

Pada tanggal 28 dan 29 November 2007, Patrick Lambe pengarang buku Managing Knowledge dan pakar taksonomi berada di Indonesia. Pertemuan dengan yang bersangkutan menghasilkan wawancara singkat berikut.

Pembicaraan berkisar mengenai persinggungan pengelolaan knowledge sebagai bagian dari sistem organisasi dan knowledge individu. Demikian juga dengan trend teknologi yang cenderung menunjukkan keberpihakan kepada preferensi individu.

KM (komunitas KM, diwakili Iris & Kris); Patrick (Patrick Lambe) KM: Good Morning, Patrick, I am Iris and this is Kris my friend from the KM Community in Jakarta, our community is initialized by group of students and alumni from Psycology Departement of UI.Can you give a brief summary of what is taxonomy and its crucial role it plays in KM? Patrick: OK, taxonmy as I see them realy just a way of organizing the knowledge around you.

Now in the physical world, we have the custom of organizing things and therefore it is very important to have a very clear structure so there is one place where the things can be found. And that is very basic to human being which spends entire life in the dictionary of history organizing things around us so that we can found when we need it.

The difficult thing about taxonomy is that we can’t be individualistic about how we organized it. So different people will organize things in different ways which is ok if you live in a small organization, small communities because you agree what your local arrangement will be. But in larger organizations, that become the problem for knowledge transfer, because knowledge and information are organized differently in different part of organization, and not only is it organized differently, it is also describe differently.

So the challenge for taxonomy in larger organization is how do you encourage people to be more consistent in how they organized their knowledge and information. And how they describe it to the language they use, and that is really important for KM. if you need to get knowledge sharing, knowledge exchange, knowledge access, across different units, its find having a system that allow you to share information, but if everybody is calling it different things then your system do not going to turn up my documents and if I am organizing them differently from you, when you go looking you would looking in wrong places or you will get confused by my arrangement.

So I don’t think taxonomy is all about management problems, but they solve the very important problem about the sharability and exchange information & knowledge across the organization. KM: so creating the systematic structure so that it can easily be found, right? PATRICK: creating a systematic predictable structure in taxonomy can turn into mistake because we are becoming too logical. At the end of the day it starts wether or not the people of the organization can find and sometimes that means giving illogical way of finding. So systematic is not necessary logical, it’s useable. Which is why taxonomy exercises is very important to find out how people see the information naturally and use many those naturally instinct possible to design taxonomy.

One of the problem with larger organization they have a lot information, and therefore the taxonomy structure tend to be more complex than human mind can usually comprehend in one glass and therefore its important to be able to use similarity.

So if you use natural language than it will be more users friendly. KM: Can you give me a statement what is the main reason that people should read your book? PATRICK: because they pay for it. KM: What kind of value do you think you offer? PATRICK: I wrote the book because I need it, most of the taxonomy project we do are parts of a larger knowledge management project, and the reason I wrote the book because there wasn’t a book in the market that relate the taxonomy to km, material in term information science, and using classification in library science, and but nothing that really look at the organizational context and practice of business, and relating it to how taxonomy supports and not support that activity, so that the reason I wrote the book, simply because the gap. KM: we are aware of that fact, that the librarians are also using the categorizing system DDC and UDC.

Could you elaborate the differences? PATRICK: actually the DDC, library congress and UDC, all those the classification scheme are hundreds years old. They in a way solve the problem for books and library; they did that for the body of the literature that is stable. In science of organization the use of information is very fluid, very ambiguous. Documents may flow through generation and in various level of access so first of all when you start from the private to you, and then it may be jump in a team, and then become the formal document that accessible by the whole of organization, and it may be revised, so it’s much more fluid, much more ambiguous, faster moving environment. Having static codes which indicates a place in the library, it’s just not going to work.

Because the content is much less predictable, it’s moving much faster, and to different people mean different thing, although the underlying science of building the taxonomy is similar. KM: who inspired you and make you plunge yourself into the world of knowledge, is it you yourself or there is a patron that introduced you to KM? PATRICK: I don’t know, that is the good question; my history is teleology, after I finish my first degree. I want to do some research so I take research degree.

In order to survive, I got a job as a librarian, and I found that I enjoy the work but it is accidental, and then after that I was thought that I was not qualified librarian level but I don’t get paid very much, the work is quite interesting but I think I should get a proper salary, so I did my master in librarianship then I work for few years in librarianship, then I decided to make like a career break so I move to Singapore and in Singapore there is not much happening in the professional library space on that time, so again to survive I move in to the training development and I was running training for companies and other things.

When the knowledge management arrived in the late of 1990’s, I realized that actually I’ve been trained in the two main experiences in two main areas of knowledge management it’s the sciences how you organized the information contents for access and trained about how people acquire knowledge and use it. So it is the two accidents. KM: OK, can you share some tips for our community to grow. PATRICK: to grow? You don’t necessary grow, it’s more important to have participations and passion, than to be large community, because large community have no participation and don’t have much impact. How big is your community? KM: Right now we have around 60 members PATRICK: Around sixty, ok, there is a community about 150 members where people stop because the group is too large for everybody know each other, so I don’t think it is necessary to grow but continue to do useful and important work, because as long as you do useful and important work you attract interested people.

KM: I have read your website, you also mention about taxonomy and folksonomy. One needs to be systematic while the other one provide ease of accessability to individual. How do you combine those into one? PATRICK: we shouldn’t combine them, into one, because that completely opposite approaches. PATRICK: the difficulty with foksonomy is it is not predictable and high level of ambiguity, so I said at the workshop yesterday, if you go to flix when you look at the tag at the mypics they have millions photographs, tags, mypics which is completely informative, it’s no use at all, from the taxonomy point of view if it doesn’t help knowledge exchange and sharing.

taxonomy will watch the language being used in folksonomy and if the same language is used again and again then it becomes the candidate for the terms in your taxonomy. But I wouldn’t try to merge into one because it’s an alternative finding mechanism KM: they support each other PATRICK: yes, they support each other I mean, folksonomy works better on small scale content, well understood content, taxonomy in much larger scale content, and more ambiguous content. KM: yesterday we had a panel discussion and one of the issue was the issue of technology, how technology change.

In the past it was supporting people to manage the information but right now they move a little bit futher, how technology is more personalized and it is more giving people comfort to deal with information, it doesn’t focus to the issue of managing information but to give people comfort to have an access to the information. What do say about it? PATRICK: actually I think some of these new tools do help people to manage information, except they did not manage in the classical sense of , you know, control and structure, it much more naturalistic way of managing, so for example if you blog it looks very unstructure and very free and quite a powerfull for managing your own information, your own learning, its like a journal, so I use a blog to manage my reading, my reflection, my discussion, my idea, and I have some simple categories inside, same with wikis, wikis are seemly powerful for managing collaborative task, with creating useful information.

That’s some that you want to do, if you want to be able to manage that, it’s not a process driven work flow machine, it use natural human processes or supporting natural human processing. KM: OK, so it gives more comfort, more ease of accessability ease of management and it is become more personalized. PATRICK: ya, but it is not inconsistent with management. KM: is folksonomy more driven by that new kind of technology? PATRICK: we have actually think about folksonomy, if you have bunch of people have shared drive and network drive and you are creating folder and you are labeling folder, that is folksonomy.

I think the interesting things which happen in folksonomy is first of all they become exposed in a very large scale content sharing and folksonomy tend to give u more interesting result if there is very large collection of content, and the second thing that the folksonomy did is they started to expose the people who tagging else well, so If you got tag on flicker, you can see who the people are who use that tag and that you can klick on the person and you can see their tags, so let say you find the really interesting photograph, and you see the photograph is contributed by a particular user, you can klick on that user u can see the tag cloud, and you can use person as a navigation tools as well as tag, so you can drag from object person to tag to person to object and give you like a trail or a series of different network trail through the content, but again that is not a very natural human thing that how we use the social network.

KM: Ya, because that was basically the issue that has been growing up when we were discussing the technology, how the social aspect is broader than technology itself PATRICK: yes, exactly. But I would say that there is not consistency in KM, it can be extremely messy because the tools itself doesn’t constrain your action you can do well you can do bad, you can use it very strange way, but you can also use to manage. I would say its more a matter constrain, so the classic software application are about constraining action, they give you A, B, C choices, and you take C choice, and they give another series of A, A, B, B, C, C choices.

The thing about the social software is completely open. It allow you to do usually one or two things really simply but very generative in terms of how you can use them, you can use them in lot different way, and you can use them with other people in interesting way, so I think the new generation software is more about taking away control and constrain. KM: Ya, there is an extra impact in the sense that it is getting more personalized and individualized, PATRICK: yes, absolutely, that is one of the consequences of taking away constrain. KM: I have plan to invite you next year for our community. Do you think you'll be available? PATRICK: at the end of next year looks like the best time for me. This year is very hectic. KM: Ok, thank you so much, I really appreciate it. PATRICK: thank you.

Last update: 14-02-2009 12:03