Internet Time Blog: Knowledge “Management”
“…KM has fallen victim to a mixture of bad implementation practices and software vendors eager to turn a complex process into a pure technology play. The result: Like many a business concept, KM has evolved from a hot buzzword to a phrase that now evokes more skepticism than enthusiasm…”
Jay Cross has a sassy blast at the ‘KM’ industry – the above is a quote from an article in Darwin magazine which looks like an interesting read in itself. What Cross and others argue is that Knowledge Management has been hijacked by IT vendors – and that KM is actually about people and idea sharing – IT is not the panacea for badly run organisational KM – successful KM results from building (and rewarding) a culture of knowledge sharing.
I rambled on about this in over in the discussions at Ultralab. Not being at all shy about re-using my stuff, I’ve quoted it here. I was responding to a question about how New Learning Environments (my current study module) can support Knowledge Creation and management. We’d been asked to respond on the KM ‘industry’:
“…I am super-sceptical of the ‘KM’ industry that I’ve encountered so far – every time I’ve heard of KM in a commercial environment it seems to be some euphimism for some extortionate over specified ‘total knowledge solution’ – I never hear “actually, with 150 quids worth of software, a bit of time, and staff encouragement, we can deliver a knowledge solution”.
So that off my chest, there are a few KM solutions that I’m aware of – some super expensive, some not so. The first two are examples of corporate attempts at KM, the last one is a ramble on weblogs.
Capturing knowledge from e-mail
One of the most interesting solutions, Tacit’s KnowledgeMail was geared around two things. The first is that most expertise and knowledge in organisations remains in the heads of staff, but a lot of this knowledge gets whizzed around through e-mail. The second premise was that users refuse (or have little time) to change their behaviour to suit any new intitiatives. They also state that there is an institutionalised reluctance to adopt new technologies, regardless of how well percieved the benefits (they claim to back this up with research).
So, very simply, it sniffs e-mail and creates a repository of knowledge – it actually captures the implicit knowledge without users needing to change their working habits. I found Tacit most interesting because they’ve had to deal with social issues – privacy (what if some e-mails don’t want to be captured?) and proven reluctance of people to use new technology.
Document management
I’ve only a little familiarity with Documentum solution, who I think are the biggest document management technology company. I know very little about it, apart from they promise to create a knowledge repository of all the documents and files in a company. This seems massively expensive, offers features such as file versioning and tracking, meta-searching on media files and so on. I suppose for firms like pharmaceutical companies that have a regulatory need to manage their documents it makes a lot of sense, but I just see complexity and cost. I think this sort of solution falls into knowledge management rather than knowledge creation.
Using cheap web software
My current favourite (I think I mention them in every post :-) are weblogs – cheap, easy to set up, database driven web content. There’s one company in particular, Userland that really push KM (and interestingly KM within schools) through their £30, super easy weblog software.
It offers a way for schools (or any organisation) to set up a server and have a collection of weblogs that let users publish articles by date. It auto archives, allows searching and there seems to be daily developments (like embedding content from other sites, and subscribing to user’s outlines of their thoughts).
A bit of self-promotion, as I set up a weblog  a few months ago as a bit of an experiment. Partly a geeky exercise, I also wanted to capture stuff that I came across and roped a few colleagues (who rarely post unfortunately) to contribute as well. Very briefly (as I’ve talked about it before), one of the features I’m pretty pleased with is the built in intra-site searches – when I post an item I specify a few keywords and it searches the rest of the site’s articles and links to any relevant ones. This is a simple, example of extended knowledge capture through very cheap software. My thoughts and findings hopefully derive more value from these other posts.
Userland sees their software being used by students and teachers to create portfolios, cataloguing everything a student produces. And of course they encourage writing skills, can capture and catalogue any type of media (although regrettably most seem focused on text only at the moment.) And, by the power of google – here’s a page with links to different examples of weblogs being used in school environments…”
So there – I’ve wanted to include some orginal writing here for a while, I guess the first day of the new year is as good a place as any to start.
I think the quote Cross cites from another book sums up the true application of KM really well:
“…(a hotels) most successful KM program uses no technology at all. It’s a “green book” of best practices collected from the top performers in every department in the company, from corporate management to housekeeping. The hard-copy volume is updated annually by a vice president of quality, and the expert content is chosen based on quality scoring procedures…”