Martin Cleaver, masterfully.

In his post, The relevance of knowledge management today, says about Knowledge Management:

The terminology and tools have substantially moved on, yet the fundamental problems are not new. As such, the wheel does not need to be reinvented, and those who have been in the knowledge management space can apply their expertise with enormous relevance.

Ross Dawson outlines a talk he is giving to the Melbourne Knowledge Liberation Front in Australia:

Knowledge management has provided a foundation for many of the most exciting developments in business today. Network approaches, including social networking platforms, organisational network analysis and industry network development, are proving to be fundamental business tools. The media landscape is being transformed by social media, including blogs, podcasts, photo and video sharing, user filtering and how user content is being integrated into traditional media.

Enterprise 2.0 is the term being used to describe how enterprise blogs, wikis and other collaborative tools are transforming knowledge sharing and co-creation in the organisation. Those with a deep background in knowledge management are eminently qualified to apply their experience and skills to these transformative domains; they represent massive opportunities for KM practitioners to create value.

Ross (who I met met when he came to Canada to visit Dr. Cindy Gordon) then goes on to say:

From the beginning of this decade actively sought to disassociate myself from knowledge management, because I felt the term had already become archaic, and it certainly didn’t encompass the scope of my interests. In an article on The Future of Knowledge Management published in KM Review and other publications in 2004, I explained why I felt it was time to move on from knowledge management, at the time identifying five successors to the movement: social networks, collaboration, relevance, workflow, and knowledge-based relationships. Moving on, this year I have found a large proportion of my energy spent on the future of media and media strategy, closely linked to my work on social networks, both inside organizations and in technology-enabled social media.

This post clarified a couple of things for me.

1. My own interests in Knowledge Management (KM) per-se took hold around 1998 when I was heavily involved in Systems Integration (TIBCO, MQSeries). KM really got my attention and I read all I could but my computing background was from a build-this-system point of view, not an articulate-and-intervene-in-an-organisation’s-goals point of view. Further, I was not involved in KM rollout so I was not much aware of the huge rift between the intentions and promises of KM compared to the implementations, which, I later discovered, were resisted in practically every case. Ross just showed me that even KM experts saw KM as having a bad name.
2. By 2000 I understood what the disappointment was about. “Knowledge Management” at Arthur Andersen was a task to be complied to for the sake of the company, and as an after-thought, not as a better means to communicate. The Andersen Knowledge Sharing mechanisms were no use to me as a practitioner: shared drives provided no context, no history, and no search, and Andersen’s official system was too cumbersome to be used to power daily work.
3. This led to my first real forray at work in this field, to implement TWiki, into Arthur Andersen in 2001. In 2004 I completed my MBA so I could better appreciate the context such tools need to be applied.

Knowledge Management had become glorified databases, technology-centric rather than jobs-to-be-done & human-centric. They didn’t support people’s end goals by making jobs easier. The Andersen knowledge system (whatever it was called) inhibited quick knowledge sharing. So people shared less, or shared over email, an approach which is tantamount to juggling hot potatoes.

Five years on, the idea of freeform collaboration in the enterprise is finally getting true momentum. From our humble 5-person Toronto’s first Enterprise 2.0 meetup back in June, Toronto 3rd Enterprise Camp in early November had in excess of 80.

The enterprise is getting social. Social-based tools and techniques have proven themselves popular in the consumer space. Applying these popular tools in business holds tremendous promise and opens up many new questions about culture and the nature of leadership.

This transformational kind of work is what Cindy &I like to do at Helix Commerce International. Our research and work with clients show collaboration dramatically improves an organisation’s competitiveness.
So just remember: while many KM tools have rightly died, the goals and promises live on in their ashes. But unlike the mythical Phoenix bird, rebirth of KM is a reality. Perhaps, this time, this bird will really fly.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 20th, 2006 at 10:07 am and is filed under Systems Integration, Social Media, Melbourne, Collaboration, Wiki, wordpress, Knowledge-Based Relationships, Relevance, Organizational Transparency, km06, Workflow, Knowledge Management, TorCamp, MBA, km2006. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.