A dozen years after the debut of
what has been called 'Knowledge Management', there has been little
significant change in the efficiency, effectiveness or value of
information processes or content in most organizations. Many companies
that jumped early onto the KM bandwagon have all but abandoned it, while many
organizations that waited are now repeating the same mistakes of the
pioneers. Despite this, interest in KM remains substantial, and this is
because, while its promise has not really been realized, it is still
possible -- and enormous.
What most organizations essentially did with KM was automate existing
information processes. They took the paper 'stuff' in manuals and memoranda
and newspapers and converted it into digital form. That made it easier
and (sometimes) cheaper to maintain, but did not increase its value,
which was, if you were to ask most of the people on the front line,
pretty marginal anyway. Organizations provided staff with access to the
Internet, but most of those who were inclined to use it already had it
at home and were using it there, without the restrictions imposed by
the company -- so that, too, was of marginal benefit. In some cases
employees are still forced to shuttle critical information between
their work and home PCs.
Most organizations, too, refused to abandon the top-down centralized
information model that was already in place, merely institutionalizing
it with firewalls, access restrictions, monster centrally-managed
one-size-fits-all databases and websites and over-engineered,
over-managed collaboration and community-of-practice tools.
Democratizing corporate information entails the devolution of
decision-making and other power to front-line workers, and executives
are understandably nervous about this.
Essentially, neither managers nor early KM practitioners 'got it': KM
is all about enabling people to share relevant, context-rich
information more freely so that they can be more effective doing their
unique jobs.
As a result, the critical business information flows, shown in the top
diagram above, are essentially unchanged from what they were a decade
ago. There have been some minor changes in the technologies used for
these flows, but for the most part these have not been significant in
improving front-line effectiveness of workers, and in some cases have
actually made work more difficult. Management continues to rely on
well-entrenched IS to promulgate instructions and policy decisions and
to extract, often annoyingly and disruptively, information from the
front lines that it needs to make business decisions. To traditional
managers, information is all about telling employees what to do and
making sure they do it.
Customers,
outside the corporate firewalls and not inclined to participate in
suppliers' technology initiatives designed for the suppliers' needs
rather than theirs (like most e-newsletters, e-rooms and Extranets),
continue to interact, information-wise, with suppliers the way they
always have -- receive (and usually turf) the marketing mail, put in
their orders and rely on their 'relationship manager' to decipher the
former and process the latter effectively. Business as usual, largely
unaffected by KM.
Things happen the way they do in organizations for a reason. When
people are unable to get the information they need 'within the system',
they will find workarounds to get it in other ways. This is nothing
new, and it is commendable -- it shows people care about the quality
and effectiveness of their work. The #1 means of getting and sharing
information is, was, and probably always will be conversations.
Pick up the phone, walk down the hall, use IM (if your company allows
it), use Skype (if your company allows it), or, as a last resort, send
an e-mail to the people who might know what you need to know.
It would make sense that KM would facilitate conversations, but if anything it has tried to obsolesce
them -- substituting databases that purportedly have the information
you used to get from talking with people, more efficiently. Not surprisingly, this has
rarely worked.
The second diagram above shows what is possible
-- how valuable information flows could be enabled and facilitated by
KM. Step by step, here is what KM practitioners would need to do to realize
this possibility:
Revamp and upgrade the role of Information Professionals
from content managers to personal productivity enablers. Most knowledge
workers have figured out how to get the content they need to do their
jobs well, without any help from KM. Centralized content management
initiatives offer little or no incremental value to them. What they
need is hands-on help managing their own content, and using the
information and technology at their disposal more effectively in the context of doing their own unique jobs.
This does not lend itself, in most organizations, to either classroom
or computer-based training -- it needs to be face-to-face,
anthropological: The IP needs to observe how the worker uses technology
and information now, and then advise them how to do so more
effectively. And at the same time, the IP needs to help each worker
organize their personal content so that they can manage it effectively
and find (again) what they need when they need it. We need to get IPs
away from their collections and help-desks and out into the field
helping workers one-on-one. KM needs to become PKM (personal knowledge management).
Reintermediate Information Professions to filter and add
more value to external content. One of the initial goals of KM was
disintermediation -- getting rid of the layers between front-line
people and useful information. The problem is, most front-line people
are now overwhelmed with the volume of information coming at them, and
find most of what is available on the Internet too raw for their needs:
They need help making meaning out of this information.
IPs, as reintermediaries, can fill this need in two ways: They can
massage raw information using visualizations, maps, tableaux, systems
thinking charts, single frames, decision trees and other techniques, and they can add insight
by synthesizing, analyzing, organizing and providing context this
information so that, in the hands of the knowledge worker, it is ready
to apply.
Develop
simple, automated, Pub & Sub mechanisms to encourage and enable
workers to 'publish' their knowledge and subscribe to that of others,
inside and outside the organization. With the advent of blogs,
wikis and RSS this has become much easier, and it allows much more
context-rich capture of information than centralized database
submission processes.
Create
new media to allow workers to obtain and share 'know-how', 'know-who'
and 'know-what' information from colleagues both inside and outside the
organization. In addition to the Pub & Sub mechanism described above, promising new media include:
- Simple virtual presence:
Simple, one-click applications for connecting person-to-person with
people (individually and in groups), with full audio (including ability
to record), video, whiteboard (see what others in a conference are
looking at and doing) and application sharing (wiki and other real-time
collaboration) capabilities.
- Just-in-time canvassing:
Templates, e-mail lists, lists of 'experts' and other aids for
identifying and asking the right people for the right information on a
quick-turnaround basis, in a single, easy-to-use application.
- Auto-harvesting:
Programs and processes that allow users to specify what documents and
messages on their hard drives can be shared with others under what
circumstances, and harvesting that information automatically in central
'mirror' sites, rather than forcing workers to submit documents to
central repositories.
- Next-generation social networking applications:
Adopting features and functionality of some of the more successful
second-generation social networking tools like MySpace, FaceBook,
Flickr, Del.icio.us, and Dodgeball, and cloning them onto applications
that make it easier to identify, create, maintain and draw on valuable business relationships.
- Stories: Tools to simply capture, index, promulgate and use context-rich stories from inside and outside the organization.
Provide tools and information resources that enable and enhance solution co-development with clients. My previous posts
on innovation and on the Wisdom of Crowds provide details on how these
resources could be developed and what they might look like. The idea is
to facilitate powerful knowledge transfer, collaboration and innovation
with customers, using methods
to identify and communicate to customers ideas and opportunities,
assess current and prospective customers' unmet needs, and then work
with customers to develop solutions that fill these needs effectively.
This can't be done as a KM initiative alone, of course; it requires
agreement on the need for a new, closer relationship with customers,
and implementation of a comprehensive innovation strategy. But
information is absolutely critical to its success.
While many
savvy small entrepreneurial organizations are adopting many of the
above knowledge-enabled business programs, most large organizations
aren't yet prepared to do so. Some of these programs are very
threatening to management, since through devolution of useful
information they also devolve organizational power. Most of them entail
some considerable risk and cost, and until and unless a greater sense
of urgency arises for better use of information in organizations and
better front-line work effectiveness, managers are unlikely to commit
the resources to bring such programs to fruition. The preoccupations of
corporate managers these days, when it comes to 'back-office' functions
like KM, are (1) security and risk minimization, and (2) cost reduction
and outsourcing. They will wait for pioneers to show them that the
risks and costs of such programs are far outweighed by the benefits of
better productivity, more engaged employees, greater innovation, and
delighted customers.
Until then, most large organizations' key
information flows will continue to be focused on instructions,
performance and compliance data, order-taking, promulgation of
marketing material and other so-called customer relationship management
data.
For them, the promise of KM is still, alas, probably many years away. |
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