RSS feedsA lot of people are asking: “Is knowledge management dead?” A common response is: “Did it ever live?”
Part of the problem lies in different people’s understanding of the term. Some think that knowledge cannot be managed because it lives inside people’s heads. Once externalised and documented, knowledge becomes information, and information management is a much easier proposition than knowledge management (KM). But KM promises so much more than information management that it’s little wonder it has become so popular with suppliers and others.
Now it’s fashionable to mock the term and knock KM’s failings, but what can replace it? We’ve already had “artificial intelligence” and “expert systems”, both of which went through the same hype cycle of hope, disillusion, despair and quiet adoption, although perhaps not in the form originally envisaged.
Do you remember those people who were convinced that all you needed was an expert system? The idea was that specialists would willingly transfer their knowledge to it, and then retire, die or be fired without diminishing the organisational knowledge base.
For both suppliers and buyers, KM systems offer a similar dream. But those pesky users have other ideas. They don’t like formalising stuff and they certainly don’t like adding metadata in case someone comes looking one day. And if it involves consulting an official taxonomy – forget it!
These users can’t see a pay-off for themselves. Perhaps, in their hearts, they feel that the whole concept of knowledge transfer is daft anyway. What can be articulated will only ever be a tiny part of what people know. Insight and context will be largely missing, and, maybe “transfer” was not such a good term either. “Copy” might have been a more accurate and less threatening term altogether.
Social software
The advent of social software has brought a new culture of sharing and, this time around, people are willing to give up some of their knowledge – providing it can be expressed reasonably easily. The range of knowledge that can be made explicit is growing all the time because the creation of text, graphics, audio and video are all becoming incredibly easy and we now have the broadband to carry the signal. Why tell people how to do stuff in words when you can show them?
So can social software deliver the dream of knowledge management? Well, it could ensure that the term survives. A precise definition doesn’t matter too much, any more than a precise definition of Web 2.0 matters. The fact is that KM is a handy term to have around. We all know it’s about “enabling the sharing of knowledge” or, to quote KM wizard Dave Snowden, “making sense of the world so we can act in it”. Social media appears to take us further into that realm than ever before.
Look at the main elements: blogs, wikis, RSS and tagging. And, behind the scenes, some network analysis.
Blogs give people a chance to share their expertise and experiences. The pay-off for the blogger is that they become known for their knowledge, which often leads to new opportunities for them. Even though they will only surface a fraction of what they know, this provides enough clues for people to find them using search, discovery or navigation. Conversations can start, which is where the really valuable knowledge exchange takes place, whether online or offline. The latter, of course, is a problem for the traditional KM brigade, but that’s nothing new.
Wikis provide a place for groups with a common interest to work together and pool their knowledge on a project. It’s fully documented, including the disagreements and corrections that take place during a project’s lifetime. Once again, some stuff will be taken offline, but the distilled results of the conversations will still end up in the wiki. This one is a much better prospect for the traditional KM folk.
RSS is great for delivering not only explicit and bang-up-to-date material of interest to your screen – favourite blogs or podcasts perhaps – but also any blogs that mention certain key words or phrases. RSS feeds are popping up everywhere and managing the potential overload is a nightmare. Fortunately, some search engines and smart aggregators exist which can do some prefiltering and prioritising for you, based on your interests. It’s also fairly straightforward to share lists of your favourite feeds with others.
So far, the amount of effort on the part of the user has been little different to preparing emails or reports in the traditional way. In fact, it’s easier to throw your thoughts down in a blog or a wiki because nobody expects the same sort of polish they’d get with a formal report.
Tagging, though, does require extra effort. When you write a blog post, the tagging is relatively minor – you click a few categories, use an automatic tag recommender or even type in a few keywords. But huge communal value is created when you get into the habit of tagging any interesting and useful material you discover during the course of your web browsing.
Joshua Schachter’s del.icio.us service is probably the best known and most peculiarly named tag-centric application. He chose the name because he wanted something friendly-sounding which ended in “us”. It’s a social bookmarking service, now owned by Yahoo, where you can save, access and share bookmarks from anywhere via the web.
You can use tags rather than a hierarchy of folders to organise and remember bookmarks. And you can tack on helpful descriptions. When you’re inside the service you can search by tag, see how many other people have saved the same bookmark, see what comments they’ve made, visit their own del.icio.us pages, and so on. As a way of getting inside people’s heads, it’s excellent although it does require a degree of diligence and effort.
Between them, these four elements of social software enable people to find others with common interests. Or, indeed, find people they want to argue with. Or simply find links to useful information. With the possible exception of wikis, the services increase in value the more people use them. If you are especially interested in some obscure subject, then the chances of finding a soulmate among millions of users is greater than if there are only a few hundred.
Because they want to
So what’s going on here, and what has it got to do with knowledge management? Well, forcing people to encode their knowledge formally is not easy – in fact, it can’t be done. But when people are socialising, even in a work context, they are much happier to share their thoughts and their experiences.
Go into a busy staff canteen and listen to the hubbub. You can be sure that a high percentage of those conversations are work-related. They don’t show up on any statistics and they’re not managed or facilitated by any computer software, but knowledge is being freely exchanged.
This is exactly what happens with social software except, instead of an audience within earshot, the audience can be as big or as small as you like. They’re brought together by common interest, by trust and by the fact that an exchange is taking place rather than a one-way “sucking their brains out”, as Narrate’s Tony Quinlan so eloquently puts it.
This sharing takes place at a personal level and has nothing to do with corporate or IT diktat – which is hugely paradoxical and troubling for some organisations. They associate social computing with time-wasting, sedition, loss of power or control, and leakage to the outside world.
IBM told its 340,000 employees they could blog and 15,000 signed up for the opportunity. Ben Edwards, director of IBM New Media Communications, says that the major value of blogs is that they allow companies to make their connections to the outside world more authentic and more powerful. He points out that IBM is a 100-year-old, highly bureaucratic and hierarchical organisation now undergoing a cultural transformation.
Lowering the centre of gravity to the people doing the work gives them the freedom to publish and make social connections with each other, with suppliers and with customers.
IBM also has 70,000 wiki users. In fact, IBM bloggers set up a wiki to help create the blogging guidelines.
“Wikis really destroy email traffic,” Edwards says. “People used to spam with their emails, now they just visit the wiki.” He lists other productivity improvements through timeshifting voice and video communications.
Coincidence of goals
For the first time, the motivations of both organisations and their staff are moving into alignment. Most staff are not consciously aware that they are building persistent information trails. They are just doing what works for the job at hand. For its part, the company is collecting valuable insights in the explicit information being recorded and in the patterns of behaviour of the participants and the connections between the information elements.
This still doesn’t really add up to knowledge management as originally conceived. It’s just an improvement on what went before. A lot of what might have resided in disconnected emails or offline conversations has found itself online, complete with all the rich links that occur naturally in the web, but it’s still much more about managing information rather than knowledge.
However, an environment is being created in which knowledge can flourish and flow. Many of the benefits of social computing are those corner-of-the-eye things where you pick up thoughts from here and there and you discover that your own insight and understanding evolves. Knowledge itself seems to exist in the connections between information elements and between the participants as well as in the individuals’ heads.
Our brains work on pattern recognition much more than they do on processing every little bit of information. This links to Snowden’s “sense-making” observations. He told IWR: “Some of us always resisted attempts to make tacit knowledge explicit. We argued for the ambiguity and brilliance of human knowledge and interaction. Now we have the opportunity to move that human-based thinking back onto the strategic agenda.”
This seems an appropriate recognition that KM systems can only go so far. They can be built to support knowledge work but can never create a mirror of our minds.
John Musser, co-author of a recent report on Web 2.0 (see page 25 for a review) suggests that these developments could lead to the resurgence of KM-type systems, but following a more flexible model. He says: “A key driver may be that Web 2.0 attribute of emergence, after decades of trying to force perfection in cases where it’s not needed.”
Again, there’s this hint of loosening the reins of corporate or IT control and allowing systems to be focused more to human needs. After all, it’s in the humans that the knowledge resides and between them where it adds value to the organisation.
So is knowledge management dead? Only if we want it to be.
It might be better to widen the definition to embrace social computing and bring it closer to the object of its ambitions. Knowledge will never be managed but the environment in which it flourishes certainly can be.
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