15 Comments »

“Am I the only one who understands the basic logic here?”
If you are, that’s an indication that knowledge does need to be managed.

I think this is a rather naive semantic game. If knowledge doesn’t need to be managed, could we replace education with osmosis? Isn’t any form of theory a way of managing knowledge?

“What reasonable business goal would suggest a need to manage knowledge?”
Any business goal based on information security.

“The promise of 2.0 is to ‘free’ the knowledge.”
Well, potentially. If by free, you mean free who can contribute knowledge, then I’d agree. But that doesn’t necessarily mean improving the knowledge. For that you need expertise, and to define expertise you need to be able to manage who has knowledge.

Interesting point - I hadn’t actually put together the paradox involved there. Though you could argue that “KM 2.0″ reflects the contradictions that anyone attempting to implement something 2.0-flavoured in a corporate environment faces. Certainly (and I love Bill Ives’ blog) my experience of KM in corporations has not been tremendously positive…

Philippe: Semantics is what turns information into understanding. Knowledge is simply a philosophical placeholder for a reality….it’s isn’t a reality…therefore there is nothing to manage.

Education is a process.

Security is in place to protect whom from what?

“You need to be able to manage who has knowledge.” Ok, I’ve just been assigned as the manager and you don’t get any knowledge.

Does risk want to BE managed?
Do finances want to BE managed?
Do projects want to BE managed?
Does information want to BE managed?
Does performance want to BE managed?
etc, etc, etc

Basic logic? Let’s get serious here can we? I’m sorry but your basic contention is exceptionally naive, and provactive for no apparent reason other than to draw attention.

“The promise of 2.0 is to ‘free’ the knowledge”
Was knowledge ever bound in some fashion? If you think KM somehow ‘binds’ knowledge then you really doen’t understand Knowledge or KM at all.

Paula,

You’re spot on. If knowledge is familiarity with facts, truths or principles, acquired from experience, directed learning or self-directed investigation (definition is cribbed from multiple sources), then what in the world is knowledge management? Can you successfully centralize how people acquire knowledge? Rob Cross has done a great work studying information flows in organizations through social networks and found that people don’t go to the most authoritative source for information, they go to the most authoritative source that they know well. The “2.0″ moniker refers to social networks and social collaboration at a grass-roots level, not top-down engineering. Provided with the right tools and a culture that values openness, knowledge gets transferred effectively without management.

Knowledge Management (KM) is more properly described as a collection of methods and practices than about technology. KM primarily deals with organizational dynamics. The failure of KM initiatives is often the techno-centric focus such efforts have taken since the nineties. If one does proper research into the field, one will come to the realization that social software and aspects of E2.0 are in many ways, reflect the natural maturation of the field. As an oversimplified statement - KM is 80% organization dynamics and 20% technology enablement. Others might put this at a 90/10% ratio. There have been many mistakes in the field - a silver-bullet belief in technology, a misplaced emphasis on supply-side aggregation (”if I pile up a lot of content and apply search and taxonomy, I have “knowledge”) and a mistaken worry about capturing tacit knowledge and making it explicit (”if only I could wire these leads into your head”).

There are aspects of the E2.0 meme and social software that - when combined with informal learning strategies, community-building practices and organizational development methods - offer some compelling opportunities to finally get KM right.

Are we arguing over words to a certain degree? I think each have valid points above. Perhaps it is the word “management” that is bothersome, it is the word that has historically been used. I think in the 2.0 framework, the word “management” is almost synonymous with “enablement” or “facilitation”. We’ve shifted (or at least I think we have) from it meaning “full control”.

Knowledge = context (largely). Data/info are mostly decontextualized and therefore subject to planning, control, directing, provisioning, etc. Knowledge is not; to the degree it can be “managed” it is via tools that are used to “manage” contexts (e.g., those associated with change management).

See Dave Snowden’s comments on Nonaka and SECI (www.cognitive-edge.com).

Walter: Ok, I’ll venture down that path…name one KM technology on the market today that adds any context. Name 12 KM articles that focus primarily on the topics/issues of context.

Knowledge is context at a given moment in time and space…all conditions acting as a force. Take it out of that context and you have nothing but a bunch of artifacts…not knowledge.

I’m afraid I was too terse. I agree with you. KM is an oxymoron. That’s why I put “manage” in quotes, and listed a few of the functions of mgt. as being associated with data/info.

Another way of looking at this is that knowledge governs decision-making/action in a given context…to put it another way, knowledge models a context. Data/info fuels the model, but does not make decisions or take actions. Only the most trivial contexts can be completely automated, and therefore managed (in the traditional sense of planning, organizing, controlling, directing, provisioning, etc.). How useful the various semantic-oriented efforts (to model context) will be remains to be seen.

Again, if you’re not familiar w/ Snowden’s critique, it’s worth running down. A key part of his critique is that traditional KM does NOT emphasize context, and is therefore not really about managing knowledge; it’s about managing information.

To the degree KM is about Knowledge, it ceases to be about Management.

I do so love it when a conversation breaks out…

I much appreciate Walter’s clarification (I’m the one who is usually mistaken in my terseness — and my liberal use of quotes!). But in an offline exchange I thought that similar words he offered, stated differently, were equally as valuable:

Walter: “The contextual aspect of knowledge is why traditional architecting definitions of a Capability are more than Technology (e.g., People, Process, and Technology)…..they implicitly recognize that any non-trivial Capability has a People component that provides key “tacit” knowledge (again, Nonaka’s definition is problematic, since some of this “tacit” knowledge is so contextual it will never be feasible to make it explicit).

Thanks for the comment you posted on my blog Paul and the reference here to an interesting original post and conversation. I provided a wider response here

Oh, and an apology for Paul rather than Paula - too many gin and tonics in the lounge at Changi airport ….

Knowledge management is rather an oxymoron, isn’t it

KM doesn’t need to be 2.anything, though, because the foundation of knowledge management is sharing and making it free. We might be looking toward Web 2.0 technologies and social computing to facilitate the sharing, and be pushing organisations toward business 2.0 and enterprise 2.0, but surely KM is still just KM.

M

I agree, however sad as the case may be we seem to be stuck with it… guess its a matter of interpreting it in the way you want..

- Arjun

Your comment

Name (required)

E-Mail (Required, not published )

Website

Want an image to appear near your comment? Go to gravatar.com

Notify me of followup comments via e-mail

HTML-Tags:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>