Posted by Denham on November 15, 2000 at 08:48:48:

In Reply to: Re: KM strategy, where to now? posted by Vaughn P Fox on November 14, 2000 at 23:42:08:

Vaughn,

You are working in a very difficult area, Clients who do not know what they need to know are in serious trouble indeed. Your approach which seems to center around providing the right information to the right people to take the right decisions (correct me if I'm off the mark) seems to me to be rather prescriptive, to ignore the leverage of tacit knowledge, to gloss over learning, awareness and self-organization and to be very linear and metric orientated, for me knowledge work is far more messy.

Often it is helpful to support activities that help clients find what they 'know', but folk are very astute about what they need to know, this is close to their identity, their raison detre, their competitive niche, and their ability to survive as an organization. Perhaps you are working with clients to improve their environmental scanning and their business intelligence gathering? Here I can see elicitation and evaluation of targets, mediums, sources to be worth while.

Please do not think I'm against incremental implementation, leveraging small successes to launch next phases, evangelizing based on past results, my hesitation is around a needs driven linear, supply-side KM strategy which I interpret as your preferred choice going foward.

Here are some further arguments from a review of Applehans etal, Managing Knowledge : A Practical Web-Based Approach

Managing knowledge, takes an incomplete and very shallow view of knowledge, and the practices associated with sustainable KM. "Managing knowledge means delivering the information and data people need to be effective in their jobs" (p18) "Providing the right content to the right people at the right time" (p17), echos the major theme of this book, which I believe misses the boat as the authors confuse, downplay and not concerned with the essential differences between information & knowledge.

Let's ask some questions: 1) What about learning and KM? Surely KM is about knowledge creation, not just distribution and access to content? 2) What about people and KM? Surely people not content and publishing is at the core of KM? 3) Do you really exchange knowledge when you distribute content? There are many reasons why some of the deepest thinkers believe it is information that is being transfered and knowledge emerges from people to people interactions, dialog and apprenticeship.

Most companies soon discover that leveraging knowledge is actually very hard and is more dependent on community building than information technology and content publishing. This is not because people do not read or are reluctant to use information technology, rather it is because they often need to share, create, test knowledge that is neither obvious nor easy to document, knowledge that requires a human relationship to think about, understand, share, and apply appropriately.

If you are looking to leverage the knowledge within your organization, following the advice of Managing knowledge may help you with the first baby steps, help you show some fast positive ROI and maybe please your sponsor. However if you wish to gain sustainable competitive advantage from KM, you would well advised to take a deeper look at people rather than the content, enable practices such as dialog, build and support learning communities, concentrate on making meaning and distinctions that matter, support knowledge sharing through recognition, raising the level of awareness and increasing critical thinking.

I found chapter 6 to be the most valuable part of this book. The authors are spot on when they say "One of the very early steps you need to take is establishing the common terms that will be used across all the content in all the repositories you are seeking to manage" (p78). The reason is a common vocabulary and agreement on meaning assists with dialog. Knowledge and all action emerge in conversations, not in the indexed repositories.

In the looming knowledge economy, the premium will be on making distributed, fast, intelligent responses, building connections and relationships, holding open communication in community, fostering strong critique, driving knowledge creation, being agile and cultivating awareness of market shifts.

You will not find one of those terms in the index of this book!

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Follow Ups:

• Re: Needs driven KM Vaughn P Fox 00:25:55 11/16/00 (4)
  • Re: Needs driven KM Denham 11:10:13 11/17/00 (3)
    • Re: Needs driven KM Vaughn P Fox 01:22:49 11/20/00 (2)
      • Re: Needs driven KM Denham 10:29:44 11/21/00 (1)
        • Re: Needs driven KM Vaughn P Fox 23:08:33 11/21/00 (0)

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