Knowledge Management 2.0 - Editorial - CIO

Using the 80/20 rule as a generalization, 80% of the challenges related to knowledge management are anchored around organizational and process dynamics. Only 20% of the challenge is related to technology enablement. I don't believe I'm being overly generous on the technology side of the issue. Ensuring that the user experience, application services, infrastructure and support frameworks are effective requires a fair amount of focus. I have mixed feelings on the article overall. It's certainly nice to see KM covered in the media. I would have hoped that the KM 2.0 meme would have taken the opportunity to discuss the social aspects of organizations. Given the need for growth and innovation, CXO's are investigating ways to harness the intellectual capital within their organization and extended network of customer, partner and supplier relationships. But any reader take-away that what we need is a new round of technology silver-bullets would be unfortunate. I'm having a bad flashback to the KM hype of the nineties sometimes applied nowadays to blogs, wikis and so on. Below are some reactions to various aspects of the article. It is still worth reading as the companies profiled are doing interesting things:

"New, focused, lightweight applications rewrite the rules about KM. The best part? People will actually use them."

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There are no new rules here. Throwing technology out there in the hope that people will suddenly become motivated and change their communication, information sharing and collaboration behaviors is much more prone to failure than success. There is a sliver of truth here however. The industry is coming to realize that lightweight tools (tags, social bookmarks and other types of attentional applications) that overlay systems can act as connection services in a more natural manner than previous software that was complex costly and cumbersome. But, organizations need to focus on human capital management, leadership, followership, community-building, role/responsibility clarity, decision rights, recognition programs, conflict resolution and other people-centric issues depending on how functional/dysfunctional the organization is in the first place.    

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"So why haven't enterprisewide knowledge management tools caught on like wildfire? There's one main problem, says Gartner VP of Research Jeffrey Mann: Users and IT administrators hate them."

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Well, they may hate their organization first and hate the tool second. Tools like enterprise content management are rarely rolled out across the enterprise because they are costly, complex and intrusive - regardless of whether people want, or do not want, share what they know. Again, KM is not a tooling problem. It is an organizational problem in terms of workers perceiving that there is a "fair process" (Harvard Business Review, January, 2003). The social contract between workers and employer is quite complex and requires a certain level of engagement, explanation and expectation clarity.   

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"Attention, CIO's: A notable aspect of this new generation of knowledge management tools is the way they offer themselves for casual involvement. "It's not as huge a commitment to use any of these things as it is when you have to set up a server, and install it and license it," says Gartner's Mann.

Acting independently, and without need of server space or tech support, business units can simply try out the new KM systems, sometimes in stealth mode. "In many cases they don't have to sell it to IT, they just go and do it," notes Mann. "You just [use] a credit card, or it's free." Now's a good time for CIO's to get up to speed on what these apps can do."

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Casual and informal involvement is the truth here. See my posts here, here, here, here, and here. But the notion that enterprises might consider public services has its clear risks in terms of security and confidentiality.   

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"A KM system that's "actually being used"—this kind of language hints at the skepticism both users and CIO's have had about KM for years. But apps like Illumio and Koral could win enterprise users over one workgroup at a time via viral adoption

One final bit of good news: Users say the new, simpler KM tools make it easier to justify the investment to your fellow C-level executives."

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KM is an additive component to a business case. Viral adoption is an important component. Organic, bottom-up champions are often necessary for KM to become socially institutionalized. But, overall, if the outcome does not contribute to innovation, growth, performance or some organizational goal (competency level, succession planning), then CXO's will not likely be any more enthused about it than before.

Source: Knowledge Management 2.0 - Editorial - CIO

Comments

[Scott Quick]

Hi Mike,

I am an investor in a small startup - Attensa.

Your post is a must read for all those Web 2.0 companies hoping to succeed in the enterprise market. Having spent a good deal of my career in this space, you have correctly characterized the the relationship between the 'Organizational Development' challenges and Technology... and where the true challenges for successful implementation and adoption lie.

Another often overlook dynamic is that many larger enterprise customers are working hard to eliminate silos of information and are purposefully sunsetting smaller departmental applications. These applications are sexy at first for all the reasons quoted in your post, but then morph into unmanagable, unsecure and unscaleable applications that typically take more time, money and energy to unwind later.

Coming full circle, I'm amazed that we need to relearn the valuable lessons of the past. Technology is, in and of itself, fairly uninteresting - unless of course it is wrapped in a holistic solution... a solution that addresses all those non-technology issues you correctly allude to in this post.

-SQ

[Mary Adams]

Reading your post made me think of the great article on complementary assets in MIT Sloan review this summer (http://sloanreview.mit.edu/smr/issue/2006/summer/11/). Authors Alan Hughes and Michael S. Scott Morton make a strong case that successful IT investments must be understood and managed together with investments in what they call "complementary assets." This means that you have to look at training, culture, and business processes in addition to the IT investment.

Seems obvious but this is the problem with KM and technology as well. Knowledge assets have to be seen as a system. This is the focus of the intellectual capital movement. IC includes knowledge but also people, processes, external relationships and brands. To create and profit from any of these factors, you have to look at the full suite of complementary assets. That is, to profit from KM investments, you have to understand the people, the work processes, the network, and so on.

[Daniel W Rasmus]

We tend to over think knowledge management. Too often knowledge transfer is seen as something that requires its own infrastructure, when what it really needs is solid communication and collaboration. People will accidentally leave behind bits (as I have often said though, they don't leave as many bits inside of corporations because unlike the Internet where information wants to be found, corporate information is an accident of process, which means it is mostly not actively managed to be found).

That being said, collaboration and communication bring people together. Content is the starting point for an introduction between people. People hate KM systems because they aren't natural. I see IM as a KM system, especially for the Millennial generation. Just-in-time knowledge transfer.

Sure, searching and repositories and all of the representation issues of knowledge are interesting techie quests. In the meantime, people in the trenches talk to each other to learn what they need to learn, and if some of that learning slops over into a document that can be found, good for the organization that proliferates such sloppy learning.