Update: Gideon’s post has been changed somewhat. It now reads, “Shorewalker, backed up by Michael Feldstein’s support in e-literate, dismisses Knowledge Management with a “Bah!” and the wave of a hand.” That’s somewhat more accurate, but it wasn’t Shorewalker’s dismissal of KM that I was “backing up”; rather, it was his(?) observation that teaching and learning are integral parts of KM.
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According to Gideon at NetDimensions,
Michael Feldstein in e-literate dismisses Knowledge Management with a “Bah!” and the wave of a hand. It’s a cop-out. A weak assertion based on the fact that someone else failed to do it that provides an excuse for those wanting less to think about.
Er…Did I say that? Apparently so. Continues Gideon,
Feldstein quotes an article (originally from Shorewalker ), and adds his support to this argument against KM. KM is bunk, we are told, because we already have — it’s called teaching. Peter Drucker, it is noted, famously said “you can’t manage knowledge” — QED, we are done.
Now, this is sounding less and less like me. I don’t believe that I ever suggested (or ever would suggest) that KM is “bunk.” In fact, in the post that Gideon references, what I actually wrote was
While I think the author overstates the case against KM a bit, I agree wholeheartedly that the best KM skills for an organization to cultivate are teaching and learning skills.
(Emphasis added.)
So what else does Gideon have to say?
The best teaching does embrace KM – Knowledge Mining, formerly known as research. Research, as opposed to sitting at the feet of the master, requires the availability good KM (Management this time). Historically this was referred to as a library. The point of KM (aka libraries) is that teachers are not always available when you need them – but a good library can go a long way to solving that problem. KM tools, specialised purpose built or otherwise, are an extension of the venerable library, and any teacher who forgets to teach their students how to use the library effectively has not done their job. Any school that forgot to build a library would be laughed at; and anyone trying to preserve and disseminate organisational knowledge ignores it at their peril.
I agree. (I’d get into trouble if I didn’t, since my mom is a librarian.) My problem isn’t with libraries; it’s with taxonomies. The Dewey Decimal System not withstanding, corporate KM initiatives often fail because they spend huge amounts of energy trying to categorize messy, unstructured information. Does that mean you shouldn’t try to write information down and organize it? Of course not. I agree with Gideon (and disagree with Shorewalker, who I quoted in my original post) that there is a goal worth striving for here, and a library is a great example. But Shorewalker is correct that KM has largely failed to live up to its hype, and one reason that it did is because the knowledge of an organization or community is not nearly as easy to codify and organize for search and retreival as a collection of bound books. There are ways around this; for example, John Udell’s observation about ditching taxonomies in this post.
Second, as Shorewalker also correctly points out, you often lose the context that makes the information valuable in KM initiatives. KM contributors usually aren’t writing books; you’re lucky if you can get them to write short posts or fill out brief forms. They’re usually too busy doing their jobs to write a whole lot down. And with comments that brief, what you have is often a lot less valuable than meets the eye. (See my informational cascades article for one of many reasons why this happens.)
This second problem of context loss is much, much harder to deal with, and it ultimately puts some significant limitations on the kinds of goals that typical KM practices can achieve. I don’t dismiss KM. Not by a long shot. But I do think that one of the best things an organization can do to ensure that KM initiatives work is teach their contributors how to be better teachers and learners.
