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INSIDE THE WRITER'S MIND
Making sense of the Knowledge Management jargon
By Bain McKay

About this article
In DominoPower, we like to run articles for a whole range of expertise levels, from the near beginner up through the hard-core expert. Since 1999, we've been publishing articles by Bain McKay, a brilliant guy, and arguably a fundamental expert in Knowledge Management. As a result, we're honored to run his articles--they're among the things that make us the proudest to be publishing this magazine.

We will be the first to admit that we have occasionally found some of his articles to be a bit inaccessible, though many of our readers just gobble them up. Denise Amrich, our managing editor, thinks Bain is a "super genius" and loves his articles to distraction because they're so "deep, trippy, magical and beautiful." She likes to let Bain's wording stand because she sees it as poetry. Here's an example:

In the end, the perfect square is a circle with many sides--a multidimensional fractal that shapes itself to your experiential context like a mirror that helps you see as much as you care, each time you challenge it, reflecting what you are, and what you dare to know about what you can know.

Also, because the knowledge Bain has on this topic is so towering that it's a bit above the heads of some of our editors (who are, to be fair, English-major types), when in doubt, they also tend to leave Bain's wording intact.

We assumed this practice was working well, as we had never before received a negative comment. Recently, however, we were surprised to receive just such a letter. Bain's response was so thoughtful, and broadened our own understanding of his writing to such a degree, that we felt it would make fascinating reading for all of our DominoPower readers.

In the article below, we have included both the original letter and Bain's gracious response.

A letter to the editor
At first, when reading Bain McKay's articles, I thought that I just "didn't get it." I was out of the loop on the KM (Knowledge Management) jargon he uses and was looking for enlightenment.

Then I realized: It's not me; it's him.

Mr. McKay is addressing a Notes and Domino technical audience, in a world where KM is only slowly spreading. Yet he addresses the audience as if it should understand the many terms he uses, when it probably, like me, does not. I try to keep up a little bit on KM, so I've heard of some of the terms, but not most, and I certainly don't understand them well. Mr. McKay makes no attempt to avoid jargon, nor any attempt to define and explain the jargon. In fact, he occasionally explains jargon using more jargon.


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