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The boston square, 2×2 matrix has become a lazy way of representing the fact that anything you want to think about in your organisation has (at least) two dimensions. I don’t think they’re big and I don’t think they’re clever but in all the talk about Personal Knowledge Management I keep coming back to this picture – because it helps me think it through rather than telling me anything startling and it reminds me that it’s “both…and” not “either…or”.

When prompted for a file name, I obviously went for kmatrix (the ‘k’ is still silent). More as this filters through my consciousness.

Ok some explanations. First, what is this supposed to say? Well it’s a map of the space really and what I hope to convey is that (k)managing a modern organisation involves working in all areas of this space – ie that it’s important to think about both personal and organisational activities and to think about these both as regards dealing with information and dealing with knowledge.

The x-axis is labelled information-ey to knowledge-ey for two reasons: one, I think it’s important not to be too precise about these things, this is not an exact, scientific model – that’s my way of getting out of endless discussions on the definition of knowledge; two, I think these are two separate but intimately interrelated things rather than a spectrum – perhaps it should be a different sort of line, I don’t know.

By Organisational on the y-axis, I mean organisational activities, things that the organisation can do, facilitate, encourage to happen etc; while the Personal is, well, um, personal stuff that people can do for themselves whether anyone else in the organisation gives a monkey’s about it.

By introspective blogging, I mean the activity of developing ideas by expressing them in your blog, regardless of whether they end up being read, understood, or taken up by anyone else. I’m not sure if any of the other things need explanation. Intrabliki is the term we used on Blogwalk 4 to talk about a blog/wiki tool used within the firewall. I realise that I have misspelled del.icio.us

[update - seems McGee is musing in a similar way]

PS – When I worked for the Audit Commission, my best ice-breaking joke when doing presentations was to apologise for the 2×2 matrix slides, but that I was contractually obliged to insert an average of 3.724 such slides per presentation in the year up to 31st March. Well, the people who get to listen to presentations from guys from the Audit Commission thought it was pretty funny.