Changing times

A big leap forward, you might say – from the last page to the first, from special correspondent to managing editor – all in the span of this issue.
I’ve been through this drill a few times and I’ve always begun my tenure by assuring readers I will continue the publication in the style they have come to expect. And then things change. They change because an editor’s decisions are made on personal and professional knowledge, visions and values.
On Graeme Burton’s watch – and with a bright and enthusiastic staff – things changed and I have deeply admired the absolutely sparkling magazine IK has become over the past two years. It satisfies me. So why change it?
Because the community it serves is changing... or more correctly, beginning to discover the true scope of knowledge work is in the hands of knowledge workers everywhere. Never in the history of human development has there ever been such a thing as a non-knowledge worker, and so IK wants to focus wherever knowledge work happens.
The recent name change from Knowledge Management to Inside Knowledge made room for a much-needed coming together of knowledge practitioners. Now it’s time to actually live up to the meaning of that title.
In fact, it’s time for the very narrow KM ‘community’ itself (on which the magazine was founded) to change, to reach beyond its own inner circle and engage in the work of the larger knowledge pool where knowledge work labours under different flags – business intelligence, change management, learning organisations, project management, product development, librarianship, even the several branches of information technology – to name but a few.
More recently, it may have been a business decision to consolidate the Inside Knowledge and Enterprise Information magazines into one publication but it was also a brilliant (if not planned) step towards bringing the first two knowledge silos together – well, at least between the same two covers. I long for the day when the EI readership is no longer at the ‘back of the bus’, separated by a second cover page and – instead – the communities of knowledge and information become one.
Who can explain the difference? In this very issue I present the story of Boeing’s knowledge loss due to the advent of personal computing and the subsequent diffusion of collaborative knowledge into the fragmentation of e-mails and attachments. Is that an IK report? Or an EI report? Well, of course, it’s both!
Yes, my friends, IK will change because the ever-changing knowledge phenomenon requires it. Please come change with me.

Jerry Ash, Managing editor

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The Laws of Simplicity: Design, Technology, Business, Life.
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Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0-262-13472-1
Publication date: 2006

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