Jim McGee, labeled
by Buzz
Bruggeman as "the smartest guy in America
about Knowledge Management," not to mention a fellow Princetonian who
I hope to see at Reunions at the end of this week, has a pithy new article up
at the ESJ site reminding us that what knowledge workers
do is a craft, not a production process. The goal of production
is to create more [Camry’s, ThinkPad’s, QuarterPounders] just
the same as the last one, and as closely mirroring the client’s
expectations as possible.
The goal of knowledge work is to deliver to your client something
that could only have been created by you. But, as Jim points
out, that may well deviate from what the client initially asked for
or had in mind. By analogy to Renaissance artists educating
their patrons about the nature of art and music and not blindly diving
into executing a commission, Jim points the way to producing a unique
work product whose form is determined not exactly through negotiation
but neither through full-bore collaboration.
And speaking of the Buzz/Jim connection, how’s this for a distillation
of what makes the blogosphere so powerful:
"Bruggeman cites Mostly McGee author Jim McGee with one of
the ideas that explains blogging’s power: Bloggers, according to McGee,
are the intelligent agents that tech tried and failed to produce with
software that was supposed to go and fetch useful information for users.
Except bloggers are human and they run around the Internet finding
all sorts of stuff and share it interactively with whoever chooses
to look for it."
