by Jon Husband
April 11, 2008 at 2:07 am
· Filed under 2.0 Design Thinking, Change, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, Enterprise Software, Social Computing, Web 2.0, Wisdom of Crowds
Cross-posted to the FASTForward blog.
Much of what follows may not be new for anyone who may read this blog. Nevertheless, I think it’s always useful to look back every once in a while, if only to see how far and fast (or not) we’ve come since this Web thing started to penetrate more deeply and spread more widely into the workplace.
The changes to what we call knowledge work are now coming thick and fast.
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Knowledge management (KM) sometimes seems like the business buzzword that won’t go away. But that may be changing. As Web 2.0 penetrates and spreads through workplaces, will it render KM as it was once known obsolete … or not ?
We have all been wrestling with the massive changes brought onto the scene by Web 2.0 technology and capabilities … changes that portend transforming the relationship between information technology, the nature of knowledge work, how organizations are structured and how humans operate when surrounded and penetrated by ongoing flows of information. It’s doubly important to note and understand that we are in reality still only in the early days of these fundamental changes to both the processes of work and the capabilities of the electronic infrastructure of hardware and software, aluminum, silicon and logic that supports these transformations in behaviour in the digital workplace.
A first wave of what we currently call knowledge management (KM) appeared in the mid-to-late 1990’s as organizations began coming to grips with the potent combined forces of information technology and its twin sister, information-based knowledge work. Much of the attention and effort centred on integrated information systems and specialized information technology that combined enabled the categorization, archiving and easy access to documents and other codified knowledge. Debates raged about the best ways to move back and forth between the codified ‘explicit’ knowledge and the less obvious, often invisible ‘tacit’ knowledge that surfaces in human interaction, and how best to enable or enhance the collaborative and interactive use of information and knowledge to get things done or create additional useful knowledge.
Much water has passed under many bridges over the past five years or so. Blogs and wikis began to appear on the scene in 2001 and 2002 and some speculated then that these tools - or more accurately their derivatives - would create a major impact on the knowledge workplace. They were followed by the evolution and expansion of what has come to be known as Web 2.0 … features, functions and web services enabled by plug-ins, widgets and other easy-to-use digital mechanisms. It was not until the middle of 2006 that IT executives and managers began to realize that lightweight, easy-to-use-and-integrate capabilities for finding information, pulling it apart and putting it together again in different ways, and exchanging that information to build useful knowledge would probably transform key areas of knowledge work and its attendant dynamics.
Today there is rapidly growing awareness that the Web will play a major, if not dominant, role in the use of information technology by organizations small and large, whether through upgrading to the latest versions of major ERP systems that incorporate social software and collaboration capabilities and a range of useful widgets and plug-ins, or through wider adoption of SaaS or a make-over of an enterprise’s work systems to incorporate collaborative platforms and capabilities. Increasingly, changes to functionality, systems integration and IT architecture will need to be built around both individual and group cognitive and interactive styles and needs as well as the enterprise’s business process requirements
Many interviews with some of the acknowledged experts in the domain of knowledge management and in technology companies have led to forecasts of some version of the points outlined below (and of course many variations on the theme that each point suggests):
1. KM assumed that knowledge work in information-based organizations basically remains more or less the same … more static or stable as opposed to dynamic (and always under construction) with ongoing reference to core dependencies on knowledge objects. In other words traditional KM was over-reliant on structure where structure when working with flows of information is difficult to impose and fix into place
2. “how to create a knowledge sharing culture?,” is not the right question. It’s more important to ask and understand “what you can do to encourage and facilitate connections?”, supplemented with tools, capabilities and socially-generated context, to help the appropriate information and knowledge be available when and where it is most needed and best used. This means that a much-needed role and focus is as a catalyst and facilitator of connections, helping others see why it is now this way and how things work
3. Knowledge transfer is self-assembling and self-organizing. It really can’t be otherwise … it is done by humans in interaction
4. By and large, incentives should not be used to stimulate information contributions. Generally, this leads to gaming by those that are better at managing than at creating/innovating
5. Had today’s Web 2.0 tools and capabilities had been available a decade ago, what we have called knowledge management would have been embraced and used more successfully
6. Considering or planning a “knowledge audit” implies auditing static “physical” knowledge assets. The knowledge accessed and used in organizations is better thought of as a dependency relationship of business / organizational processes on knowledge objects which underpin the social construction of just-in-time knowledge from ongoing flows of dynamic information.
7. We need to think more carefully about combining top-down design and direction of business processes with the bottom-up use of knowledge objects. The combination of structure and organic generation and synthesis can help manage effectively in continuous flows of incoming and outgoing information (knowledge objects are anything that we can coherently manage).
8. An appropriate amount of structure (design constraints) is necessary to enable consistent recall and findability of information.
9. Computers alone cannot competently tag content. Authors must tag the content they create and / or use. Putting names and labels to content is essential and often may be words that do not appear in the content (this is the essence of metadata).
10. Centralized IT control is on its way out. Much more of the decision-making about what platforms / applications / software to be used will be made in by line management or by project teams. Security concerns are real due to Web 2.0 but not apocalyptic and should focus on protecting corporate data, not in regimenting the means of collaboration.
11. Human Resources (HR) will in all likelihood need to undergo a massive transformation. The nature and design of knowledge work keeps changing and as that change accelerates, it’s likely that companies will need to move towards the self-organizing of work … including people, tools and methods.
Exploration of the issues in the field of Enterprise 2.0 has also more recently led to the understanding that social computing depends to some degree on the architecture, engineering and specialized knowledge handling technology that has come before. Numerous vendors with KM-labelled products (mostly leveraging intranets) appeared in the market in the late 1990s and early 2000’s. During that same period, hundreds of major enterprises developed and implemented KM programmes and / or functionality, to some degree or other.
Social computing in the enterprise is intended to improve the collaboration, use of information and knowledge and the decision-making effectiveness of individuals, teams or the whole enterprise. Today, more and more of the established KM-oriented products have added social-computing functionality. Existing capabilities and implementations are being adapted, re-designed and/or added to by Web 2.0 applications, platforms and capabilities that make it easier and faster for knowledge workers to exchange information, collaborate and build and use.
While through the spread of social computing KM may be coming out of an initial identity crisis, the advent and rapid spread of what is termed Enterprise 2.0 has helped create for KM a new Identity Crisis 2.0. Today it seems clear that the new crop of collaboration tools, platforms and methods for enhanced collaboration are rapidly synthesizing and integrating fragmented or separate components of what was understood to be a KM-oriented system a few short years ago.
And whatever the current guise (which is likely to be different in virtually every organization) increasingly practicality and ease-of-use will rule the day.
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Jon - simply a brilliant post especially the 11 points you make.
In my minds eye you have outlined the nexus of Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0, and KM 2.0.
Well done being that too many analysts, pundits and enterprise gurus are still word wrangling with terminology 
Gee whiz … thanks.
“Practicality and ease of use will rule the day.” Hear, hear!
Great post Jon, a superb synthesis of a lot of themes and thoughts that you’ve articulated in the past.
There is one point, #10, that did give me pause for thought, however. As long as someone has to keep the lights running and the infrastructure humming along to enable all of these magical flows of data and electronic connections that allow us to collaborate and innovate, I simply can’t see IT not being part of that entire picture. IT taking the lead in product selection is problematic to be sure (line of business doesn’t want to use Product X because it doesn’t meet their business need or users hate to use it, but IT does because it runs on their Favourite Platform[tm]), but so too is pure line of business decision making on the selection of a product without IT support or consideration (LOB loves it, IT wonders who will staff it, fix it, keep it going, cost them in maintenance fees, build the servers using The Other OS[tm] that IT doesn’t support, etc.).
Either way, you’ll end up with someone’s nose out of whack. And for what good reason? So someone can say they “won?”
I’m a fan of both/and, not either/or. IT does have valuable criteria to add to the product selection process and that criteria, be it mandatory or desirable, should be weighted and scored right up there with the tool’s ease of use, the business problem its solving, and associated costs. Good evaluations are fair and balanced and take into consideration the opinions of everyone in a structured and prioritized fashion.
Let’s all be friends, right? Isn’t that what collaboration is all about? 
1. KM is not adaptive, 2.0 is.
2. KM supports collaboration. Collaboration is not social networking; 2.0 supports the latter.
3. KM wants to manage things; 2.0 wants to free things in loosely connected ways
Rx: You can’t truly embrace 2.0 until you free yourself of KM.
[but I still like you ]
Tweetstream today: Complexity is the adaptive middle between Chaos and Order. Design is the adaptive middle between Science and Art.
KM is a pole, not a middle. “Use the Force, Luke.”
And don’t confuse KM with DM…DM is still necessary. KM is just a ‘bad trip’ you learned from but don’t want to repeat.
Thanks for this, Paula.
I see your points, I understand them, I generally agree with them, and I am going to raise a couple of additional points. So, I guess I am seeing you and raising you ;-), though not in the e of a game of chance using cards played around a table aimed at winning.
I am seeing and raising in the hopes that we both (and any readers who may be interested) may come to some additional insight and perspective.
And as Steve alludes to, I’m also not very interested or invested in terminology per se. I don’t consider myself an expert, but rather an informed and perhaps deep, generalist. So there’s a more than reasonable chance that I’m talking out of my pockets here, but here goes …
I think that developing, constructing and using pertinent and relevant knowledge does not, by and large, arise from what we understand as classical or traditional KM. I do think there are elements of constructing and using pertinent and relevant knowledge that benefits from dependency and and thoughtful re-use of knowledge objects. I do think that constructing and using pertinent and relevant knowledge happens in the course of purposeful interaction (most of the time - purposeful is not an essential condition) between people, such as is experienced in the collaboration used to address problems, issues and opportunities, which often is augmented or enhanced by the processes of social computing.
I also think that much of the content / information material used in the process of collaboration and social computing requires, or is improved, by an infrastructure that makes pertinent information and knowledge more readily discoverable, retrievable, accessible, available, usable and able to be shared amongst the participants and / or stakeholders in the process of constructing and using pertinent and relevant knowledge.
It is the development of this infrastructure that has been a key element of classical or traditional KM .. specialized and powerful search engines, taxonomies, improvements in the process and use of tagging, specialized domain or process-specific artificial intelligence (such as natural language processing-based text analytics and summarization) and yes, the practices underlying document management. I think it is this infrastructure, by and large, that sits underneath the layer or layers of interactive / collaborative capabilities that social software and social computing have brought to the knowledge-based workplace, and I think some or much (but not all) of that infrastructure has been developed in enterprises (differently in each enterprise case, with some aspects of similarity or standardization) standardization) in response to a driving force offered by the concept of KM. What we previously understood as KM is only one of the forces that stimulated many organizations to implement various KM-related applications and services, but it was present and has been useful.
As I said, I don’t consider myself an expert, particularly when it comes to technology, but I agree with Dave Snowden’s assertion that if “we” had social software available a decade ago, had more instances of corporate cultures that were open to or even just reasonably tolerant of freer exchanges of information, ideas, dissent and dialogue and had been using that social software to interact, collaborate and construct pertinent and relevant knowledge, what was termed KM that decade ago would have been much more effective and much less painful.
I think it comes back to your point about “managing” … I do think we need a new word for what is often understood as “managing”, or a different (wider, more adaptive and more oriented towards sensemaking and taking practical action after the sense is clear) understanding of that word.
You may not see it the same way, but so far I think we agree much more than we disagree
I spoke about the convergence of KM and 2.0 tech at a number of forums in 2007 including the Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco and a national IM/KM canference in Australia. You can see my various presentations at http://slideshare.net/trib/
There are some that would argue that E2.0 makes KM obsolete. This is not the case. KM can exist without the technology. The technology offers a platform for pervasiveness and ease of implementation. But without management drive, cultural capability (localised or across the organisation) and openness, you’re doomed - tech or no tech.
There’s a lot of KM stuck in the past, let it be said - KM as process, KM as isolated parts of the organisation, etc. But there’s equally a lot of very forward-thinking KM practitioners out there.
We need to bring the tech to the people and make KM easy.
The problem with discussing the differences between knowledge management and enterprise2.0 is that it depends on definitions and what you do.
I am sort of in Stephen Collins camp that E2.0 focuses more on the technology and that KM focuses more on the content and process.
But I try not to get hung up on the definitions. I do recognize that there is an enormous overlap in the goals, needs and problems with KM and E2.0.
E2.0 tools help to break through some of the issues with KM. And KM needs to rapidly adopt these tools. I am particularly drawn to number 5 on the list. I think KM would have been very different if E2.0 tools were around when the KM movement started.
Gordon .. if only collaboration was just all about being friends, Actually, it has long stuck in my mind that Michael Schrage, in a marvellous early (1990) book on collaboration titled No More Teams - Mastering The Dynamics of Creative Collaboration, addresses this “urban myth” by pointing out that some of the most famous and effective of collaborations (Picasso and Brach, Watson and Crick) were rife with arguing and conflict.
I don’t think collaboration is all about getting along together; I think it’s about being dedicated to a closely held and meaningful objective, being honest and giving the process your most full attention and best effort. Tools and resources that make *that* process deeper, easier and more effective are welcome and necessary.
Stephen … I think your point of view is correct.
Thanks, both of you, for stopping by.
Gentlemen: 2.0 is not about technology (I’ve written about this several times) — there are however, technologies that enable this phase of evolution and thus bear the same label.
I agree with all of the points Jon brings up. If you look at the elements he illustrates at their essence however, we’re just talking elements of Content Management, Search (findability), Workflow etc. Collectively these make up the infrastructure to provide digital workspaces — which is entirely different from KM. If you move all of those items toward the provision of digital workspaces and if KM (as Stephen suggests) is not about technology, then what is left to make up KM?
The ‘infrastructure’ Jon speaks of is all very well supported already by the individual disciplines/practices of Content Mangement, Data Management and the overall general aspects of Enterprise Architecture.
I am still at a loss as to what is uniquely KM and to what purpose it serves that is not already served by established disciplines. The individual elements of function (collaboration, et. al.) do not need a container for which KM is uniquely positioned to serve…and if they needed a ‘containter’, the concept of “information workspace/workplace’ is more meaninful and useful than anything KM has ever brought to the table.
This is the same infrastructure for which FAST brings various elements to the table…to inform and enable.
Again, I am more confused than ever as to what is left for KM to ’support’?
I do see the term continue to be uniquely leveraged in call center situations, but it’s a leftover. The elements for which the label is applied are fundamentally data management, content management, workflow, etc. You won’t find the Content Management Professionals organization and practioners aligning themselves to KM. Nor that of the Data Management practitioners. So perhaps anyone still suggesting they’re a KM practitioner, should take a look at the industry at large and decide where they might want to realign themselves to the work being done. KM is an umbrella term for which there is nothing left underneath — unless I’m missing something.
I am still at a loss as to what is uniquely KM and to what purpose it serves that is not already served by established disciplines.
I think that KM was HR and line management’s first widespread attempt to “talk” more fruitfully with IT, and for IT to snicker back at HR and line management. Arguably, work design in enterprises is still coming to grips with all the IT-enabled capabilities for “doing knowledge work” better, and Web 2.0 / enterprise 2.0 is the first really substantive opportunity to get more deeply into it (”it” being designing knowledge work around / through the information flows that the infrastructure of which we are speaking now enables).
Paula, I absolutely agree with you that anything 2.0 is not about the technology. Technology is and always has been an enabler. Tools and approaches with 2.0 labels should be such that we can use them to do our jobs better - Government 2.0 connects government to the constituency, Library/Enterprise/Web 2.0 connects the source and their services to the users. It’s all about enablement and people
.
KM also should be about people. Often it’s not as it’s seen as a widget and not a practice or cultural thing. KM should be about sharing, openness, exposure of as much tacit knowledge as possible, mentoring, succession planning, engagement, knowing where to turn for information. Tools can enable and enhance those practices, but if 3×5 index cards can do it for you, go crazy.
I think too often, organisations feel they need a KM practice because they don’t actually do the things that embed KM practices into corporate DNA. I know I’m preaching a little heresy to the KM purists, but it’s not different to what people like Patrick Lambe and David Gurteen have been saying for ages.
KM shouldn’t need to be “done” as a particular thing belonging to a particular part of the organisation. It should just be. Be a part of what you do every day. Be a part of how your organisation operates.
[...] or subscribe to the RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!There’s a really interesting discussion on KM and 2.0 tools going on over at the FASTForward blog. I’ve managed to get myself involved and am probably [...]
It should just be. Be a part of what you do every day. Be a part of how your organisation operates.
Stephen .. again, I think you are correct. I think that is essentially what I meant re: HR and line management and needing to bring “work design” up to date, into the modern world, so to speak..
Paula how do you really feel about KM?
Clearly you and I do not share the same definition of KM or what KM should be doing.
Of course, I am not sure how your are defining Content Management, Data Management or Enterprise Architecture.
In the end it all comes down to how you define the disciplines and how you define your role in your organization.
John, I appreciate very much that you like what I have to say. Thanks.
In terms of your HR thinking, I agree. My wife is an HR manager for a large Federal department in Australia. She is also a good strategic thinker on HR (see her missives at htp://www.shiftedhr.com/). Something she identifies very often is that like KM, HR is treated as widget-based. Do an HR thing here and another there. But what happens is that context vanishes. One part of the organization or process is deeply divorced from another so the silos and isolation and non-strategic perpetuate.
It’s this sort of thinking and practice, whether it’s around HR, KM or management thinking in general that causes the schisms and turf wars we see on 2.0, KM and everything else recycled almost ad nauseam. So yes, HR, line management (who should be leaders as well as managers), KM practitioners and the rest of us need to take a bigger view of what we do so that we see where the blocks are, where the holes are and progress (as rapidly as possible) toward an understanding of where we should be addressing information, knowledge and leadership needs in our organizations.
It’s Jon, not John, but I’ll forgive you in advance.
Yup.
I started out as an HR-ish coonsulatnt .. job evaluation, compensation strategies, [performance management, etc., moved through competency analysis and profiling, and on “up the value chain to leadership development, org design, org change and “soft” people-oriented strategy .. before the web came along.
I’m (somewhat) astonished that the calls for silo-busting and enhanced cross-function communications and collaboration continue to resonate loudly, twenty years after the calls for same started in earnest.
I think that the hierarchical arrangements of work in modern enterprises (at least on paper, even if everybody’s using IT to search for and use ‘work arounds” of any sort that will work - and yes, I am offering vast simplifications and generalizations here) have been maintained mainly because of compensation practices and because many of those higher up in hierarchies like the status and power that being higher up usually offers, even if they are only semi-consciously aware.
But I would think that … I’m the “wirearchy” guy (a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on knowledge, trust, credibility, and a focus on results enabled by interconnected people and technology).
All kidding aside, I have spent many years thinking about and engaged in most if not all aspects of work design and a broad range of HR and management development practices. Most of it (the practices) has to change more than it has changed to date, and I think that the OD org development) world has much to offer. Gary Hamel calls for Management 2.0 in his book The Future of Management. I think it’s a bit thin or general in spots but generally on the money, and some reviewers have called it an important book. It’s worth reading, at any rate.
Oh, I’m so sorry about the misspelling!
Hamel is coming to my town in a few weeks. I’m tempted to go along, but it’s AU$800 for the day. Probably worth it, but will I get signifiacntly more than his books offer?
And yes, like you, I remain more than a little bemused that the same arguments continue to be trotted out for organization redesign and cultural change. Apparently the wall of noise the past 20-odd years hasn’t made much of an impact in some places.
Probably worth it, but will I get signifiacntly more than his books offer?
I doubt it (getting significantly more than the book will offer). I’d spend $80 for two copies of the book (onefor you and one for your wife) and then go on a nice getaway weekend to a nice hotel, a couple of good meals, a bottle or two of superplonk, and debrief each other / compare notes. You’ll probably get much more out of your $800 on several levels that way
There’s a sense in which questions like “what is uniquely KM” and “what purpose it serves that is not already served by established disciplines” require, or at least imply, absolute delineation of roles and functions.
The fact is, KM as defined by yesteryear might have “moved on”, but there are organizations whose adoption of enterprise 2.0 or KM are hindered by factors not at all related to the differences between them. The disjunctions between these designations may be significant in some organizations but which is “more meaningful” is probably best left to the evolution forces within the organization’s DNA.
Jon - I believe I’ve said it before, but I’m really liking your writing here. You do a fantastic job summarizing and fire-starting, which is always a welcome capability! And you make my writing style seem almost haiku-like, you prolific writer you!
On Michael Cheng’s ideas (to Paula’s comments) - dead on. Why should KM or E2.0 be any one thing? And what technology solution today even IS a single purpose? Since they are both systems of thinking, cultural attitudes and inclinations, and finally, technological functionality, it would be a bit silly to think that there are sharp edges around either one of these. I am however, similarly afflicted as Jon, in that I see connections and fuzzy edges everywhere I look, so my view of most things is not going to be that black and white.
On Doug’s commentary, regarding item #5 from the list, definitely agree. Usability, simplicity, lowered costs, and a brewing acknowledgement that, between the mass exodus of retiring boomers, and ever distributed workforces in general, 2.0 solutions offer one heck of a greater chance that KM might happen at all.
Having been involved in KM research, events and consulting over the last 10 years… whew, people have tended to WAY overcomplicate “doing KM” to the point where it was nearly as expensive and painful as traditional ERP deployments! Make it so the system is capturing “knowledge artifacts” while you’re doing the work, and hey, you might actually capture knowledge in a timely enough manner that it can actually affect the business.
We hit just these topics last week at the Boston KM Forum meeting, hosted by Bentley. Great conversations, and specifically tied to the combo of E2.0 and KM2.0, you can find a copy of my presentation “Enterprise 2.0 = Knowledge Management 2.0?” on BizTechTalk.
The presentation had a brief romp through KM 1.0, into Enterprise 2.0, what the marriage of KM and 2.0 might embody (loops, immersion, flow, emergence) and then specifically hit KM-oriented highlights from our Market IQ on Enterprise 2.0, released at the end of March. That project was a market study, analyzing 441 respondents, embodied in over 80 pages and more than 70 figures/charts.
A subset of the survey population had “knowledge inclined” characteristics, which we determined with a weighted battery of questions, analyzing cultural aspects of the organization, incentives, individual attitudes, etc., and popped out findings that were very interesting to us. Had hoped that a knowledge-inclined crowd might “get” E2.0 more than the average bear, and it appears they do.
Take a look at the presentation for yourself, or the full Market IQ on Enterprise 2.0 report (free download, just need to create an account), and would love to continue the conversation even further.
Will be presenting more on both E2.0 itself, and KM2.0 as well, on the main stage and a tracked session at the June E2.0 Conference in Boston. Hope to see you all there, as well as continuing the evolution here.
Cheers,
Dan
I’m still underwhelmed by the KM evidence. In the end 0.0 + 2.0 is still 2.0
Then again, how many of you besides Jon were at FASTforward ‘08 to be immersed in the issues around the User Revolution?
Perhaps you’re missing the point of it all — it’s to revolt against things like KM.
Paula, unfortunately I wasn’t a FASTForward ‘08, despite being invited for a panel by Susan Scrupski. It’s a long, expensive way to come from Australia. As for user revolutions, I’m all for them - both from the point of view of users themselves turning to methods and tools that work for them and from the point of view of business finally taking notice and care of users.
KM only needs a revolution where KM is implemented as a widget. As a “thing” to be done. As a process. Once you embed stuff in corporate DNA and people’s attitudes that are just about “doing stuff”, revolution becomes unnecessary.
Organisations that are truly successful with KM implementations (and E2.0, Web 2.0, etc., etc.) aren’t about having “a KM process”. They’re about changing the culture, the “way we do things around here”. This is exactly what my Office 2.0 talk was about last year. Unfortunately, the follow-up talk didn’t get selected for the E2.0 Conference in Boston this coming June. Hopefully it will get up for Office 2.0 2008.
Take a look at just one of many examples, at the Janssen-Cilag wiki implementation - a huge success by any measure. E2.0 tools plus a quantum shift in culture! This is what real KM and real E2.0 are about.
Of course, they’re smarter than to call what they’ve done E2.0 (except to those of us that are also talking about it). They’ve just done it. This is how these things need to be treated in order to be really successful. I don’t think you’re imagining it this way? You appear (and I’m inferring from your writing, so please correct me) to be seeing KM and E2.0 as difficult, big bang stuff. It both need not and shouldn’t be. That approach is very old school and not something I want to get involved in, thanks.
Stephen: Thanks for your thoughtful response. and I missed your Office 2.0 talk last year (had client presentation that day). [Welcome links to same...]
Yes, the examples given are E2.0 and no, I’m not suggesting ‘big bang’ (all my prior writings on the subject reflect such) — indeed, incremental and ‘just start’ is a critical essence of 2.0.
This issue isn’t about what clients call this…this is about what practitioners do to ‘compartmenalize’ practices and focuses — and by doing so, further confuse clients.
Language is very powerful. We need to be more responsible in how we leverage it.
I’m simply asking for justification to continue to use the KM term. In what conversation does it add value? 2.0 has very specific elements of design, approach, etc. for which the term can be instructive. Other terms are aligned to functional categories that happen to have technologies and/or methods to facilitate: Content Management, Search/Findability, Analytics, Social Networking, Collaboration, Information Workspaces, Communities of Practice.
I am still at a loss as to what is aligned to KM for which the term has any unique value to continue in its use…to where it is adding value to a deeper ‘understanding’ in conversations. All of the answers so far have simply suggested it is other things that stand by themselves and have formal organization/practitioners who address the elements/activities deeply.
What would someone who aligns themselves to KM deliver that is not already covered by these other disciplines?
I am still at a loss as to what is aligned to KM for which the term has any unique value to continue in its use…to where it is adding value to a deeper ‘understanding’ in conversations. All of the answers so far have simply suggested it is other things that stand by themselves and have formal organization/practitioners who address the elements/activities deeply.
What would someone who aligns themselves to KM deliver that is not already covered by these other disciplines?
This is essentially why I wrote this post, and termed it a retrospective
> This is essentially why I wrote this post, and termed it a retrospective
Yes I agree Jon which is why I stated in 1st comment well done nexus of Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0, and KM 2.0. Frankly, I find the word wrangling a bit tedious.
Hi all,
That’s a great post Jon and this is a great conversation we have here. A good example of what a blog offers: it helps us grow!
I’ve read “I am still at a loss as to what is uniquely KM and to what purpose it serves that is not already served by established disciplines” in a comment and like Jon I would like to say a word.
If people got it 10 years ago, you’ll probably get it today Paula.
You are right Paula when you say that elements of KM were already in place before KM. The reason why is that KM is not about tools, it is about how we understand what is important in value creation. For ages the answer was muscle sweat and a lot of people think that way despite most advanced economies are 80% based on services today. With this new reality, some people have started thinking differently: maybe it is not muscle swear. So what then? Brain juice. We now understand that the value creation is made with brain juice. We call this a Knowledge Economy. Baker wrote some good stuff back in the 60′.
KM is one trend, among quality management, reengineering, communities of practice and Enterprise 2.0, that helps us implement a knowledge-based economy. “What you can’t measure, you can’t manage”. Because knowledge is implicit, we have to explicit it to manage it. We need to rematerialize. KM did a good job by documenting and referencing knowledge. We have created some massive knowledge bases.
The biggest database is by far the web. The massive uses of tools enabling web content production, blogs, wikis and social bookmarks, contributed to an explosion of content. By doing so people were initially formalizing and referencing knowledge. Like before. But it was personal knowledge, subjective information that were sitting a click away from each other. This generates controversy and conversations in between websites. Comments appeared to make it more comfortable and relevant. They concentrate in one place, more than allow, conversations. That exactly where the shift is : from documentation to conversation. The social layer is now in place and we just see its beginning.
With this shift, there is another shift happening. We change both our conception of knowledge management and knowledge itself. We now concentrate on knowledge sharing and we understand knowledge differently.
When it comes to defining knowledge, one can distinguishes three dialectics: Explicit vs Tacit, Ontological vs Contextual and Private vs Public. The first one is based on the physical status of knowledge, the second one on its epistemological status and the third one on its economical status.
In the KM era ‘Explicit – Ontological – Private’ understanding prevails. That is the reason why there are many processes (explicitation), data (ontology) and egoist ‘knowledge is Power’ behaviors. This later is the reason why KM fails.
Social computing is based on a radically different ground i.e. ‘tacit, contextual and public’; and Stowe Boyd one of its prominent spokesperson. In an organization, existing implementations show that social computing is altered in explicitable, contextual and collective to be compatible and successful.
So personally I don’t see the point of “saying if 10 years ago…”. It’s gone and some necessary work has been done back then. We now work on a different level. We try to work on present knowledge, not past knowledge. We try to materialize conversations, knowledge on the go. ECM focuses on the result: a document. Enterprise 2.0 tools focus on the journey between the idea generation and idea formalization. In between what you have there is individual and collective work : reflexion and conversation. Enterprise 2.0 tools capture, at the very same time they enable, conversations. And in a much more efficient way than emails, distributed by nature, as centralized in one place (a blog, a wiki). You now have knowledge management on the go.
This is a different stuff and a different organization. While KM was regarded as a specific job, with a specific team who has specific expertise, it is now dispersed throughout the organization as embedded in operational processes. There is no KM anymore because it is just everywhere.
In fact KM is still here and keep on doing the very same stuff. But what happens now with knowledge sharing is not often the responsibility of the KM team. Knowledge Managers have to rethink their understanding of what is knowledge before they go down the road of Enterprise 2.0 projects and implementations. They don’t have to deal with data and documents, they have to deal with people. Only now Drucker’s “Managing knowledge is managing people” is operationally meaningful to KM people. Before only HR and enlightened managers got it.
So Jon, I think HR certainly needs a lifting but probably not a “massive transformation”. KM needs to rethink fundamental aspects, HR needs to put more “social” in its process. We need to stop this over focus on individual performance and appraisal and start evaluating, encouraging and rewarding the collaborative side of any employee action. Individual appraisals is the principal source for the “knowledge is power” understanding and the principal reason for KM-related strategies to fail and corporate under-performance.
“Self organization” along with “corporate democracy” were two popular trends in the 70′ that failed. We need hierarchy, but we need different one. Not a “command and control”, old school thing inherited from the Army. We need a hierarchy that favors individual initiative, personal commitment and open collaboration. HR is key in designing the process and the managerial discourse (Greenleaf is back!) … and Enterprise social computing (aka Enterprise 2.0) delivers the tools to make it work.
In this respect, “how to create a knowledge sharing culture?” and “what you can do to encourage and facilitate connections?” are identical questions. It’s just a different angle. The reason I see for considering they are distinct lays in the fact that no one internally, or externally (see http://venividiluxi.com/en/?p=50) today has the skills and resources to address them globally.
[...] all the gold lives, actually where all the gold is made. Here’s a quote to remember from Jon Husband (very [...]
There seems to some assumption that 1) I don’t understand KM and 2) I’ve never ‘done’ KM. Neither is the case.
I do take issue with this: “KM needs to rethink fundamental aspects”
There is no spoon…
KM = Pink Elephant, ok I’ll go for Wooly Mammoth. It ‘did’ exist at one time. Now, there is just the echo of voices resonnating the past.
Let’s try another angle on this. What’s the age of anyone using the term, still? Tell you anything?
@ Paula : no such assumption at all. Sorry for the misunderstanding!
@Paula - my age = 38. What’s that tell you? 30-40% of the room at the Boston KM Forum last week was under 40, by my guesstimate.
Hehehe …
It seems we are agreeing to disagree because of some of our positions and perspectives (hey, welcome to the human race
Maybe we can all agree on this …
Knowledge work is changing a lot due to easier and lightweight tools and services that help people exchange information and construct useful knowledge in near-real-time, and it will change even more over the next few years due to 10 enhanced collaborative capabilities and 2) an ongoing rise in the number of tech-savvy and web-savvy younger workers.
The ease of use that Web 2.0 tools and services has brought to the party is critical. So too is an intelligent architecture of heavier-weight IT capabilities such as comprehensive databases benefiting from comprehensive taxonomies, sophisticated enterprise search, 2nd or 3rd gen document management, and so on …
Let’s call it … I dunno … Work 2.0 ? That, incidentally (as most of you probably know) is what IBM calls “this new playing field”, as people like Rod Smith, their global VP of Emerging Technology, move around talking with the large companies that are or may become IBM’s clients.
All good sharing. Where I insist that we need to ‘facilitate thinking’ over ‘managing knowledge’, IBM has a ThinkPlace: http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/thinkplace/help/en/html/help_home.html
Forrester offers a model for Information Workplaces:
http://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/0,7211,42796,00.html
Tom Davenport also thinks Enterprise 2.0 is the New Knowledge Management
http://discussionleader.hbsp.com/davenport/2008/02/enterprise_20_the_new_new_know_1.html
Sure, there are a few differences between classical KM and E2.0. The tools are largely different, for one. Perhaps the most important difference is the emphasis on emergence of content structures in E2.0, rather than specifying them in advance, as early knowledge managers had to. But I’ve always felt that most information environments require some mixture of structure and emergence. Social networking and its various technology platforms will be critical in pushing KM to the masses.
Like I said above good post on the nexus of Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0, and KM 2.0.
[...] like to finish on that note, but I just came across a perfectly relevant piece by Jon [...]
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