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The Fear of Knowledge Sharing
There was an editorial piece in CIO magazine last month by Rick Pastore, entitled Why We Fear Knowledge Management. It reminded us that a year or two ago, one of our colleagues in Europe mentioned that his firm
could sell a certain amount of Knowledge Management work, as long as they didn't call it Knowledge Management.
Pastore makes the point that even when it's clearly understood, KM can be seen as a
threat. His advice? Make the benefits clear at the individual level: "Employees who contribute and borrow (knowledge) will save time and energy, avoid stress, and look good because of their valuable
contributions to the company..." Way back in 1998, at the first International KM Summit, Susan Hanley presented an overview of her program at AMS and made this same point. When you're selling KM to a community, sell the benefits to the user. Don't sell the fact that it lets the company retain knowledge when it starts to downsize. Nobody wants to hear that.
KM hasn't had an easy start in life -- it's been over-hyped, held hostage by technology and otherwise struggled to get out from under various misconceptions. We recently came across an article in
the New Jersey Law Journal listing KM as one of the 10 most important technologies for lawyers. That's good news, but the article presented such a limited view of what KM is about, that it may not help advance the cause. Time will tell...
The Chicken or the Egg?
Last week, a discussion thread in the World Wide Knowledge Management Forum at Ryze Business Networking considered whether Knowledge Management or Change Management should be the priority in a corporate program. That's an interesting question, but we think it's a bit like asking about chickens and eggs. Adopting a KM way of working is very much a culture thing. Some companies take to it naturally, but many do not. In our experience, casting one's KM seeds on the hard and rocky ground of a typical business environment is asking for failure.
Way back in April 1997, Gartner Group predicted there would be three kinds of KM paths for business. Type A companies would see the vision and invest in KM as a strategic program, even if the benefits seemed somewhat intangible. Type B companies would follow, investing out of a perceived competitive necessity -- "If they've got it, we better get it too!" Type C companies would only get in the game when they couldn't avoid it, because the technologies for sharing and reuse became part of the interface, at home and in at the office.
And as Gartner predicted, KM technologies have become pretty pervasive. We've all gotten used to being in a world of virtual space and hyperlinks and information on demand. The tools are at hand,
and it's the organizational culture that determines what people make of them. The same technology can be applied to collaboration and innovation, or to command and control. In the end, it's not a matter
of Change Management or Knowledge Management. It's a matter of leadership.
Blogging for Business
If you're unfamiliar with the term "Blogging," you're not alone. There are over 2 million
blogs on the web, but only 2% of Americans know what a blog is.
Blog is shorthand for Web Log, and it's essentially a very simple technology for web publishing. Blogs have tended to be associated
with the hip and/or the young, and seen as a means for delivering one's philosophical ramblings to the world at large. But they are more and more mainstream every day. Howard Dean has a blog. So does Dave Barry. Businesses are starting to pay attention, for good reason. Blogs are cheap
(even free), easy to implement, user friendly and topical. That gives them some very real advantages; we've seen at least one article suggesting the blog may be a key technology for the future of
Knowledge Management.
On the public facing side, companies use blogs to position their CEOs as thought leaders, letting them speak to the world in their own voice. They provide a new channel for
corporate communications and (since blogs are indexed by search engines) another way for people to find their way to your door. Corporate blogs are still subject to issues around corporate
responsibility, though, so they shouldn't be used to bash a competitor's product. Employees' private blogs are another question, and Blogger has recently published advice on "How Not to Get Fired Because of Your Blog.”
On the employee facing side, companies can use a blog to keep
people informed about items of interest. Knowledge Street has recently added an employee portal page to the web site we designed for InSys Consulting. The "InSys News" section is fed by a blogging tool (Blogger, in this case), and is there to help build a sense of community within the company's distributed work force. We're adding new bits of
IT news every day or so to keep it fresh, but this section will also include internal information, with announcements of new hires or office closings or what have you.
If you'd like to know more,
drop us a note. Or just run a search yourself -- the truth is out there.
Connecting with KMPro
Virtual communities can be great, and are certainly a good way to break through barriers of time and
space. Thankfully, though, they will never replace the face-to-face experience. As human beings, we need that too.
If by chance you're based in New Jersey, have an interest in Knowledge Management
and would like to connect with some like-minded folks, you might consider getting in touch with KMPro. This would be a good time to reach out, too,
since the chapter is going through a kind of transition period, seeking to define what it might or might not be in the future. If you're interested, just reply to this newsletter. We've been members of
the chapter for about a year, they're a very nice bunch.
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