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The Character of KM
Back in the day, one of us was able to attend the first International Knowledge Management Summit, in San Diego. It was June of 1998, and Dr. Peter
Drucker was the keynote speaker. A splendid time, and a very memorable event. Also on the bill was Ian Scott, of the
London Business School, who was presenting his then recent research into the emerging role of the Chief Knowledge Officer.
Scott identified a group of 20 CKOs, from Europe and North America, and
interviewed them about their jobs. These folks were in their 40s or 50s, with very diverse backgrounds. They were techno-literate, but not techies. Most were professionally ambitious, but also saw KM as
serving a social purpose beyond the interests of their firm. One third were women.
Scott's subjective judgment was that they were a lot like each other: bright, articulate, passionate. They were
having fun with the job, and had the kind of nurturing quality that let them take pleasure in the success of others. He did some psychometric analysis that confirmed his gut feelings. It showed that successful CKOs fit a definite personality profile, with strong scores on particular emotional attributes: they were extroverted, open, rational, tender-minded and conscientious.
It suggests that people who fit this CKO profile are likely to succeed even with primitive technologies. People who don't fit the profile are likely to fail. We've often observed that the wrong
culture can be a deal-breaker when it comes to KM. The character of the players can be equally important.
Neat or Scruffy?
Management and Technology Consultant Jim McGee recently blogged about this fundamental division in the ranks of KM practitioners: there are those who like a structured, precise and orderly approach, and there are those who don't mind a messy solution, as long as it works. McGee himself was a Neat back in his college days, but with age he's moved over to the Scruffy side. He also sees this as a trend in KM thinking, with corporate taxonomies and centralized repositories losing ground to blogs, wikis and other things with a Web 2.0 flavor. "Grass roots efforts will yield value," he writes, "where large-scale, centralized, knowledge management initiatives have failed." We've been telling folks that for ages!
Since the mid 1990s, this question has been something for practitioners to talk about. There are those who see the KM job as a supply-side thing -- collecting information and organizing it in a
way that will provide answers to questions yet unasked. They favor lots of detail, electronic repositories and personalized portals. Then, there are those who don't see the point in building a Knowledge
Base for the ages, when we're not even sure what questions will come up tomorrow. For them, it's better to invest in simple tools that make it easy for people to share stuff, without worrying too much
about the structure (or lack of it). Earlier this year, we saw an excellent presentation by Bruce Karney of KM-Experts, in which he
suggested that the point wasn't really to manage knowledge but to eliminate ignorance. That's something that happens when you make it easy for people to ask for help, find a coach, validate their own
insights and search for new approaches.
So our advice is not to worry too much about lining up the knowledge in neat rows, but you should try to keep the pot bubbling.
KM in the Public Sector
Based on a survey taken at this year's E-Gov Knowledge Management Conference, the public sector may be making some progress in KM. Although not a scientific sample, the several hundred practitioners in attendance were a pretty good cross-section of government workers. About half the group came from federal civilian agencies (State, Labor, Health and Human Services) and a quarter from defense. The rest were government contractors, representatives of state and local governments and members of academia.
The results show a general maturing of KM, with programs on average having been in place for four and a half years. The number of agencies reporting KM systems "in production" has also
increased, and is three times what it was in 2002. The nature of what people are doing is also changing. Portals were hot five years ago, but as these government KM efforts have matured, there's been a
shift toward collaboration efforts, with communities of practice, content management and document management also turning up in many places.
On the whole, that would seem to be encouraging news.
To KM folks, a lot of the failures of government are clearly failures in Knowledge Management. It would sure be nice if we could start getting it right.
The Machine is Us
Among the many, many things that have been written about Web 2.0 (whatever that may or may not be)
there's a very effective little video by Mike Wesch, an assistant professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University.
It's just under five minutes long, and presents some core Web 2.0 concepts in a very compelling way. Wesch considers it an "eternal beta," although he's posted a slightly revised Final Version
of the video that first appeared on YouTube in February 2007.
There's not much more we could say about it, other than recommending that you take a look. Since the rest of this issue ran a little long, it's the perfect time to pass it on!
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