Just Published - “Making Knowledge Work - the arrival of Web 2.0″

Hi there — if you’re interested in a review of your book on my blog, I’m happy to oblige. (No promises beyond my opinion, as fair as it can be). As an added bonus, I will figure out some way of passing my review copy on to someone else to keep the conversation going.

Hi, Bob. I’ll be glad to ask the publisher to send you a review copy, if you provide your mailing address and the capacity in which you’d review it (KM expert, consultant, corporate, etc.). I’ll also mention to the publisher your willingness to pass it on if you offer an indication as to what type of network into which you would pass it.

I can be reached at jon.husband AT gmail.com

Congrats Jon and you’re timing is spot on because

a) the need for update of KM subject matter from the late 1990’s by incorpoating Web and/or Enterprise 2.0 stuff

b) the winning organizations today and tomorrow will be those that learn to be collaborative and share employees’ knowledge.

And who will make the web2.0 interface which Jon can put here so that I can press a button and recommend the book to my local library?
Links to Amazon Jon?

Good point re: local library, Jp … you mean who has made or will make the Digg / reddit-like widegt specific to library recommmendations ?

Re: Amazon .. the publiisher won’t put it on Amazon; it’s one of those industry-report type books for which they have set a crazy, crazy price of 345 pounds (UK). Imagine that .. I will bet you that you cannot find a book of that price on Amazon.

For most books on Amazon, even the new releases are discounted almost immediately, from their price of about (usually) $30.

I don’t get the sense that is what this publisher wants to do, that is, selll it at a discount from an initial price of $30 or $35.

Jon, first, congrats on finishing the book. It is a great milestone.

I have to say I’m a bit surprised to see a book from you at this price. It puts it out of reach for so many, yet the very message I would presume is about access in knowledge work. You are the voice of wirearchy.

I’m curious, why did you make this decision? (I can understand purely financial decisions.)

Will any of the content be liberated? (And no, I am not asking for a review copy - I am uneasy here, and on the verge of publishing a book with two colleagues, and realize there are a lot of questions I have to answer for myself. )

I look forward to hearing your thoughts and I hope I have not tread on too delicate ground in a public space.

Nancy

Hey, Nancy .. thanks for stopping by.

And I say hehehe .. while I appreciate your delicate and gentle discretion, I’m not at all bothered about answering your questions and talking about the issues you raise in public.

For example .. I agree 100% with you re: book pricing (personally, I would not charge more than say $20 or $25), but it was not my decision to make. Heck, the publisher even more-or-less told me to mind my own business when I asked why it wouldn’t be on Amazon ? Evidently this is a kind of industry report-type book that ARK group sells direct to bigwigs and IT decision-makers and “knowledge managers” inside medium to large sized enterprises. I suppose they know their business and business model, but I sure as heck wouldn’t charge that, nor would I buy it at that price. But then again, I am not an IT director or someone concerned with the “knowledge” of management in an enterprise (other than as a quasi-academic and . or consultant practitioner interest).

Why did I make the decision (to write this particular book, I presume you mean) ? Well .. first of all I would much rather have worked on writing a book about “wirearchy” but I know almost nothing about how to market a book proposal, don’t have a literary agent and don’t know where to get one, and so did not have the opportunity to do that.

Second … here (below the line of asterisks) is the basic story of how I came to write this particular thing (excerpted from this blog post (link directly below) …

http://www.fastforwardblog.com/2008/03/09/for-all-those-who-have-said-blogging-was-just-a-fad/

… on the FASTForward blog where I am blogging along with some blogging colleagues about Enterprise 2.0 and “eOD” and such like.

I’m glad you asked those questions, Nancy … they are good ones to ask, of course .. and I hope I have answered as openly as you may have expected me to.

The book MKW is IMO pretty darned dry stuff, unless (maybe) one is curious about work design and the issues of change re: knowledge work going forward in an interconnected age .. and even then .. you know, it’s pretty dry
Would you believe me if I said something like “I wrote it because it was there ” ?

*******************************

(abbreviated story of how I came to write the book MKW)

“Email is still in many cases the “killer app” for human communications, but the advent of wikis and blogs lent some additional structure and focusing-of-purpose (in the context of knowledge work in an enterprise) to communicating for the purpose of accomplishing objectives. That’s a key reason why essentially every purveyor of enterprise software has incorporated the capabilities of wikis, blogs and easy publishing to the Web into the collaboration suites they are now working at selling to the enterprise IT function.

It was this realization, for example, that led to the writing of “Making Knowledge Work - the arrival of Web 2.0″. I was a reasonably early adopter of blogging, and because I had been involved in the issues of work design for the past two decades, I became convinced that wikis and blogs would spread into the enterprise setting. I thought they were a natural extension beyond using email for people to communicate and share information that may be useful to small groups of other people interested in the same or similar issues.

In 2003 I began arguing about that with a man who was on the Board of Directors of the blogging start-up I co-founded (Qumana) and who at one time had been the head of KM research at the Gartner Group. His position was that it was just a fad that teenagers and cranks were using to bleat on about whatever it was they wanted to bleat on about, and my position was that “yes, there was that aspect to it”, but that it was also a natural way for people to express ideas, opinions, point others to useful information, carry out arguments and dialogue and spark insights and the need to collaborate.

Well, blogs and wikis continued to spread and eventually Web 2.0 and then Enterprise 2.0 became recognized as domains of ongoing activity in which participation, interactivity and collaboration were key dynamics. In 2006, he (the man I was arguing with) basically said “OK, you win” and challenged me to add the observations and knowledge about the use of social computing (wikis, blogs, etc.) to the existing edition of “Making Knowledge Work” which had not foreseen the rise and penetration of Web 2.0 tools, services and dynamics into the enterprise setting.

So, my writing of this book was more accurately a massive revision and adaptation … believe me, adapting from the highly structured “knowledge-engineering” approach to KM to a much more fluid, flow-oriented social computing approach and synthesizing and weaving together the two was not always evident or easy, but / and I would argue that is what many or most organizations will have to at least consider if not do over the next 10 years or so.

Yes, he and I argued some more.

It will be most interesting to see what the state of human communications looks like in 2015, both inside the firewall of organizations, and outside … although it may be that the lines between “inside” and ‘outside” continue to blur, the beginnings of which we have already seen and which has been much discussed, though to date mainly in the realms of marketing, PR and more recently product development.”

Thanks, Jon, for sharing the story and your motivations. I actually totally understand “because it was there.”

I have been trying to figure out HOW to price our book. I’m thinking about asking people what they would consider paying!

Thanks for following up, Nancy .. and I am glod you understand the :it was there” … my version of climbing a mountain, I guess.

Asking people what they would pay for yours and your colleagues’ book is pretty much tightly aligned with the world and ethos you and I inhabit, I think