Lucidea’s Lens: Knowledge Management Thought Leaders
Part 113 – Eric Tsui

Eric Tsui is an educator, consultant, author, speaker, and community leader. He is a former professor at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU). 

Eric is Vice President of the Hong Kong Knowledge Management Society (HKKMS). He specializes in digital knowledge networks, cloud innovations, knowledge management, Industry 4.0, MOOCs, learning theories, open education, global classrooms, eLearning, innovation, digitalization, and entrepreneurship

His current interests in KM (through collaborative research, training, or consultancy service) are digital literacy, personal learning environment and networks, and KM technologies including search engines, portals, personal knowledge management (PKM), and knowledge cloud services. Eric conducts research in cloud intelligence, blended learning, knowledge-enabled business process management (BPM), communities of practice, and platform ecosystems. He teaches and consults on KM, taxonomy creation and maintenance, content and document management systems, BPM, service Innovation, and communications.  

Here are definitions for five of Eric’s specialties:  

• Communities of Practice: Groups of people who share a specialty, a role, a concern, a set of problems, or a passion for a specific topic. Community members deepen their understanding by interacting on an ongoing basis, asking and answering questions, sharing their knowledge, reusing good ideas, and solving problems for one another. 
• Content Management: Creating, managing, distributing, publishing, and retrieving structured information – the complete lifecycle of content as it moves through an organization. 
• Personal Knowledge Management (PKM): Collecting information that a person uses to gather, classify, store, search, retrieve and share knowledge in their daily activities and the way in which these processes support work activities. PKM is a response to the idea that knowledge workers need to be responsible for their own growth and learning. It is a bottom-up approach to knowledge management. 
• Search Engines: Tools that allow searching for sites, documents, files, list items, content, answers to questions, and other digital information. They allow specifying the scope or domain of the search; whether to search on text, images, or metadata; and how results should be presented. 
• Taxonomy: A particular classification arranged in a hierarchical structure that can be used to organize information so that it can be readily found through navigation, search, and links between related content. 

Eric created the following content. I have curated it to represent his contributions to the field. 

Book Chapters 

An Introduction to KM & Its Evolution in the Last 2 Decades 

Technologies for Personal and Peer-to-Peer (P2p) Knowledge Management 

My PKM Strategies 

The objectives of the author’s approach to personal knowledge have always been to: 

• Avoid overloading of email messages in the routinely used email address(es)  
• Incorporate a PULL capability for various topics of interest and from various (valued and trusted) sources  
• Enable automatic classification of all incoming information  
• Make use of freely available tools to improve indexing and categorization of stored information  
• Try to maintain the information received at the organizational, group and personal levels in synchronization  
• Never ignore the people issues  
• Build trust among colleagues, clients and friends  

Over the years, the author has been gradually experimenting and perfecting the following set of strategies for PKM:  

1. An alternative email address other than the usual one is established. (There are two reasons for doing this. Firstly, automatic broadcasts, auto-alerts, and promotional information will be sent into this email address rather than the routinely used one(s). Secondly, there are occasions where one needs to send a message to an untrusted audience (e.g., distribution list of a newsletter, an anonymous email address) and, based on past experience, it is better to use a second Email address to do so. This way, the broadcaster’s ordinary Email address and affiliations are not disclosed.  
2. For Web sites/newsletters/research services/library databases that one value, if possible, configure an Auto Alert agent/service that regularly scans and extracts relevant/new information from those sites. Most information services Web site provide such a feature. If not, some of the Personal KM tools mentioned in this paper also provide this capability.  
3. Automatic filtering and classification agents are also configured in the receiving Email handling program to categorize the incoming messages into their respective folders. For example, in the Lotus Notes environment, this can be accomplished by the use of Agents. In MS Outlook Express, Business Rules can be set up to perform this task. If there are multiple alternative Email addresses, consider forwarding all incoming messages into one Email address.
4. Whenever possible, develop and maintain a consistent structure to classify files on various computing devices (e.g., laptop, office desktop(s), home PC, etc.) so that it is easier to locate information. Consider using a Peer-to-Peer tool (e.g., Groove) to share/replicate electronic workspaces across multiple computers. For example, the author uses his company laptop and desktop to store work-related information, university workstation for student details, assignments, lecture notes and research material, and home PC for personal and family information. PKM tools are used to index the material on individual machines. Furthermore, Groove shared spaces are created to replicate specific information across these machines. The CSC Portal is used to collaborate with CSC colleagues and clients, at work and at home.
5. For backup, portability and ease of sharing purposes, Quick Response Kits (in the form of small CDs – each one can hold up to 160MB of material) are also routinely created. A Quick Response Kit (QRK) contains key CSC information, worldwide best practices, cornerstone articles and reports, and key presentations recently compiled by the author. Currently, there are QRKs in KM, E-Learning and Content Management.
6. Time permitting, the author always try to assist others. Furthermore, other people’s interests are remembered and relevant material are sent to them routinely.
7. Build up trust in others by sending others only un-biased, non-marketing, relevant, and quality material.
8. Continuous learning is also very important for every knowledge worker. The author maintains a very extensive network of peers (e.g., graduate students, university researchers, librarians, industry analysts etc.) at the local and international levels.  

ChatGPT vs Professor on Commonly Asked KM Questions 

I won over ChatGPT on responses to the following 5 common KM questions:  

1. Are there standards for Knowledge Management? Should we adopt them? 
2. What are the best KM methods and tools to use? 
3. Two important steps in a KM journey are formulating a KM Strategy and Knowledge Audit. Are they both absolutely required and which one should come first? 
4. Do we need knowledge management specialists in all organizations? 
5. How to start knowledge management from scratch? What are the benefits, tools to use? What are the challenges and how to mitigate them? 

My reflection is the ChatGPT vs Professor competition proved that applying with care and consciousness, the combined response from the two is more than the sum of the individuals. I feel that ChatGPT’s response often complements what I missed mentioning and at the same time offered me and my students lots of opportunities to discuss the quality, accuracy, completeness of the responses. This is a new and refreshing experience as before there was rarely something or someone who challenges or ridicules what a teacher says in class. Teaching and Learning enters a new era with the use of AI tools.