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280 Chapter 8

KM will blur the boundaries between the individual, the group or community, and
the organization. KM will become a pervasive part of how we conduct our everyday
business lives. Personalized KM (PKM) will gain increasing importance given the ever-
increasing momentum of information overload that we must deal with. In other
words, some of the key principles, best practices, and business processes of KM that
have to date been focused at the organizational level will fi lter down to be used by
individuals managing their own personal capital.
PKM and traditional knowledge management differ depending on whether an
organizational or personal perspective is adopted. Tools for personal information
management are impressive and, if you think about e-mail and portals, are already
widely used. Newer tools such as blogs, news aggregators, instant messaging, and wikis
represent a new toolset for PKM.
The personal portal, what was once an enterprise portal, is now focused around the
needs of the individual. All of a person ’ s information and application needs harmoni-
ously are brought together and arranged on the desktop, mass customization in front
of your eyes! Again, the aims are laudable, but reality and theory are often miles apart.
PKM brings many of the key principles of KM to bear on the personal productivity
and specifi c work requirements of a given knowledge worker. Defi nitions of PKM
revolve around a set of core issues: managing and supporting personal knowledge and
information so that it is accessible, meaningful, and valuable to the individual; main-
taining networks, contacts, and communities; making life easier and more enjoyable;
and exploiting personal capital ( Higgison 2004 ). On an information-management
level, PKM involves fi ltering and making sense of information, organizing paper and
digital archives, e-mails, and bookmark collections.

Knowledge Sharing and Dissemination Tools

Rollet (2003) made a distinction between communication technologies, such as
telephone and e-mail, and collaboration technologies, such as work fl ow management.
Yet it is very diffi cult to draw a line between the two. Communication and collabora-
tion are invariably intertwined. It is quite diffi cult to establish where one ends and
the other begins. Both types of tools have been grouped under the category of
groupware or collaboration tools. Although all organizational members will make
use of communication and collaboration, including project teams and work units,
communities of practice will be particularly active in making use of many if
not all of the communication and collaboration technologies described in this
section.