John Maloney has an interesting discussion of push-pull: Push Awareness, Pull Content
Push Awareness, Pull Content should be the mantra of effective knowledge management.
The simple principle is to just provide awareness of information to people. Some call it ‘skimming the cream.’ If they wish to do a deep dive, then give them the capability such as social context, librarians, knowledge brokers, relationships, conversations, structures and so forth.
The topic of Push/Pull is going to come up in the class I am teaching at Northwestern, and John touches on some of the ideas that I think are worthwhile discussing. I have been thinking of this in terms of how people deal with information and how this changes as new technologies are introduced which shifts the amount of push/pull required.
In the first session, one of the students asked about this in terms of information overload. The connection for me, as a knowledge worker, is that I want the "right" information in the right places. John's suggestion in the article is that the "cream" should come to me with enough hooks so that I can drink deeply when I need. The other aspect of this is that I would like to define what is "cream" rather than having someone (or something) else decide that for me.