Citing a lack of research literature regarding Knowledge Management (KM) for individuals, this KM guru provides a comprehensive 53-page review of the literature and products involving Personal Knowledge Management (PKM).  He also identifies the impacts of "disruptive technologies" regarding the future of knowledge capturing and sharing in the workplace.

[Tsui, E. (2002). Technologies for Personal and Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Knowledge Management (Electronic Version).  Computer Sciences Corporation Leading Edge Forum, 1-53. Retrieved February 7, 2007 from http://www2.csc.com/lef/programs/completed_02.html.]

PKM involves regimens that assist individuals with KM issues, as opposed to those of large organizations, which have employed top-down perspectives that are centralized for enterprise-wide (EKM )deployment and often times cost and maintenance prohibitive for small companies.  (These more inflexible, IT labor-intensive tools cited by Tsui include Knowledge Maps, Taxonomies, enterprise search engines, e-collaboration tools, information repositories, Expert Systems, Case-based Reasoning, among others.) Highlights of his review and thoughts regarding the future of KM follow.

Noting the on-going controversy around the definition of KM, Tsui prefers one that focuses on the KM processes such as creating, classifying, indexing, distributing, and valuing knowledge for reuse.

PKM Skills and Tools

Several articles on strategic PKM skills are cited.  Among those are a set of skills Tsui modifies from his own experience and that of  Skyrme (1999): 

1. clarifying information needs;
2. sourcing strategy development;
3. deciding on information to be "pushed" and "pulled";
4. decide on how/when to process information;
5. establishing criteria for filing/saving information;
6. creating personal filing system compatible with work activities and knowledge areas ; 7) considering  information dissemination by breaking it up and indicing it for multiple purposes;
7. reviewing and evaluating stored information on a regular basis.

Key factors he identifies as essential to the success of adopting PKM skills are overcoming "internal" resistance; trust-building with peers to receive relevant information in a timely fashion; and experimenting with various technologies.

Through an extensive review and from personal PKM experience, Tsui modified Barth's (2000) list of PKM tools producing the following PKM tool categories:

1. Index/Search - these tools index local or networked computer drives using different types of searches such as keyword; full-text; Boolean, etc. The vendor EnFish offers products in this category;
    
2. Meta-search - the use of several search engines in a combined effort to eliminate the constraints of individual engines.  Search.com, Metacrawler.com, Dogpile.com and Mamma.com are examples of some of these meta-search engines.
    
3. Associative links - these tools act as on-line dictionaries and hyperlinks with hypertext and pop-up menus to various topics on the Web.  Examples of these associative links are Atomica Personal, a free download from Atomica, which markets personal and enterprise (corporate) KM products; and DB/Textworks, a similar, but more pricey ($250 price range) software product from InMagic. 
    
4. Information capturing and sharing -- tools which allow the user to copy, paste, drag, drop information from the Web or other documents and to form new documents, which can be stored in a variety of formats.  Additionally, they offer user alerts to new information.  Entopia offers three products in this category:  Quantum Collect; Quantum Collaborate; and Quantum Capitalize.  Tsui notes a key benefit of this technology is enabling the user to re-use the information in Word documents and e-mail messages, which further facilitates the productivity of individual KM workers. 
    
5. Concept/Mind mapping - visualization tools which help isolate, organize and present ideas via searching, zooming and other navigational features, and which are often presented in three-dimensional frameworks.  Tsui notes Mind Manager and The Brain as two "exceptional" products in this category.
    
6. E-mail management, analysis and unified messaging - due to steadily rising amounts of e-mail messages received by the workforce, and the corresponding time necessary to read/process those messages, Tsui notes the emergence of tools to organize, filter and divert messages.  Similar to the information capturing and sharing tools identified earlier, these "intelligent agents" have been configured for computer desktops via an e-mail message and programmed to varying degrees to  collect and to organize information for more efficient end user processing.  Examples of these software applications are Firedrop's Zaplet, Gizmoz's Gizmo and Returnpath. 
    
7. Voice recognition -- these tools accept input in the form of verbal commands and aid users, for example, by performing tasks and manipulating computer files and directories, sending instructions to operating systems, reading e-mails and establishing Internet connections. Two such products are Dragon Speak and IBM Via Voice.  (Training is normally required to calibrate the software to adapt to a user's voice patterns.)
    
8. Collaboration and synchronization - is a category of tools that foster knowledge-sharing among groups interested in a particular topic via discussion, question-answer formats and idea sharing.  These forums are often hosted on public websites with a large range of personalized options available.
    
9. Learning - tool categories foster the individual knowledge worker's unique learning process by helping in the accumulation/planning of course modules, training, and assessing of competencies gained. One Tsui-noted example is BrainX's Digital Learning System (DLS) which captures and converts various types of information on the Web (documents, texts, pictures, drawings) into question and answer format (Q&As). 

Tsui's observations on what the future holds for PKM tools in general (both IKM and EKM-supported tools) include the evolution of operating systems to incorporate the aforementioned PKM technologies in these systems, and the expansion of EKM vendors to add knowledge processes that also accommodate this market of IKM workers.  He notes that Microsoft's XP operating system already incorporates support for processing workflow, speech recognition, scanned-document management and simple server-side collaborations. And the next "breed" of e-mail tools, will include a type of intelligence (concept extraction via semantic and syntactic parsing) to identify the message's purpose and more strongly integrate with management tools (contact management, phone books, electronic diaries and calendars, for example) in addition to curbing the information glut. 

P2P Computing

Also noted is the increasing popularity of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) computing which solves some of the inherent weaknesses of client server systems by utilizing information at the edge of networks. Generally, an electronic device at the edge of a network is termed a "peer device," but a "peer" has also been defined broadly as computer software, a client, server, wireless, mobile, peripheral I/O device or storage/server.  Operating in an unstable environment in this decentralized region of the network provides P2P computing with its emergent and "disruptive" technology status.  

This author's focus is on the impact of P2P computing on KM due to his and others' observations that more and more workers are shifting from employment to contract status thus making collaboration more boundary-less rather than the traditional intra-organizational variety. Thus, he notes P2PKM becomes a natural extension of individuals practicing KM to knowledge sharing with groups of peers. File-sharing, collaboration, and search activities are the three functions that he notes as common displays of P2P computing.  With P2P technology, a file can be located anywhere on a P2P network and can be shared by anyone on the network.  Two commonly-known P2P file sharing activities are distributing anti-virus software applications within an organization, and downloading (authorized) music files. Challenges and criteria for file-sharing are also noted. 

Collaboration has become imperative in the evolving knowledge-based economy, Tsui notes, due to increased task complexity and creativity demands of workers.  P2P computing provides an easy, flexible means of supporting numerous small group collaborations over the Internet.  Examples of P2P collaboration tools include Groove, Flypaper, eRoom and Team Wave. 

One of the key differences between conventional on-line searches and a P2P search, points out Tsui, is that in a "true" P2P setting, information at any user (peer) node is indexed only when the user is on-line, which means that the information is constantly being updated.  With traditional search engines, content needs to be verified and updated regularly.  Problems and constraints of P2P network searches are also discussed by the author.  

Critical issues facing the expansion of P2P technology noted by the author are those of:

• performance,
• security,
• the lack of standards,
• change, and
• copyright issues. 

Tools/Knowledge Objects/Resources/Contacts/Etc:

• Barth, S., (2000). The Power of One. DestinationCRM, in http://www.destinationcrm.com/km/dcrm_km_article.asp?id=477.
• Skyme, D. J. (1999). The Knowledge Networker's Toolkit. Butterworth-Heimann.