Content Precedes Design

A New Year, A New Era for Generative AI

As we step into 2025 amidst rapidly evolving GenAI capabilities, one question looms large...

How will humans and AI work together?

If you’re energized by GenAI, are you also concerned by the problems employing it presents? Fear not!

Knowledge Managers can provide sanity amid the GenAI mania.

Drawing upon our collective decades of practical, applied experience across industries and the globe, my SIKM Boston co-authors and I offer this timely article exploring how we can shape the GenAI value landscape by blending human creativity with AI’s power. We argue, as KM practitioners, that we have novel approaches to harnessing this new toolset… leveraging Collectivity (facility with human intuition and interaction), Nostalgia (wielding a rich, non-linear information recall), and Selectivity (attention to weak signals).

Collaborative Innovation

Employing collective sense-making to enhance AI outcomes and foster trust.

Harnessing the Past for the Future

Dynamic curation of historical knowledge to improve AI’s accuracy and relevance.

Breaking the Mold

Out-of-box thinking to unlock hidden opportunities and mitigate the risks of AI conformity.

2025 is the year to lean into collaboration between human knowledge-based expertise and GenAI. The future isn't about AI replacing human knowledge workers—it's about creating an evolving, valuable human-AI ecosystem where KM professionals play a crucial role in ensuring accuracy, context, and innovation. These behaviors will be critical. Will we seize this opportunity?

Andrew Trickett, Eve Porter-Zuckerman, Katrina Pugh, Marc Solomon, and myself invite you to read our article and share your thoughts. Let’s shape this new landscape together!

https://osf.io/atfyz

Past Performance *is* Indicative of Future Results

If your team/organization has taken on and sustained the practice of project retrospectives (see my earlier post), I applaud you. Great initial step, but you're not going to see the true value from this practice without going further. You're now faced with the opportunity not only to reflect and maybe get some clarity on the bigger picture successes and challenges, but also to memorialize those so others can actually do something with that information.

All of those lessons learned around capturing what propelled and confronting what dragged will forever be buried in those notes/outputs unless they are actually shared, understood, and considered next time around by other teams.

I'll repeat: Lessons learned die in PowerPoint decks… unless shared, understood, and considered next time around.

Arguably, there is a responsibility to generally socialize these lessons learned across other teams and beyond within your organization so some things actually start to take hold. These things can span what might need to be integrated into the way everyone approaches a plan, how they kick off a project, or how similar challenges are handled at any point by anyone who encounters them.

This is true Knowledge Management at work, and as with any KM paradigm set up for success, will only be effective by combining the right tools, processes, and people responsible for sustaining this continuous improvement paradigm.

My Slides - Making Secured Content Discoverable in SharePoint - SIKM Boston

Thanks for attending my presentation at this month's SIKM Boston meeting!

You can download the slide deck here.

My Slides - Making Secured Content Discoverable in SharePoint - ESDDC

Thanks for attending my session at Enterprise Search & Discovery (co-located with KMWorld) presented in collaboration with Cryptzone!

You can download the slide deck here.

My Slides - Trusting Your KM & ECM Strategy to SharePoint - INFOGOV14

Thanks for attending my session at InfoGovCon!

You can download the slide deck here.