Martin Cleaver, masterfully.

In http://socialwrite.com/2007/02/12/short-report-from-fastforward07/ Jevon said:

People tried on several occasions that this era is just Knowledge Management repackaged. I feel like I am missing something drastic here. The change now goes deeper, has immediate impact and is focused on PEOPLE, not knowledge. Rebuttal needs work.

“Knowledge Management” has been around since about 1988. It’s mature enough as a goal that it does not take a single lens of goal of just ‘knowledge’. Major notions such as Human Capital, Social Capital, Relationship Capital and Structural Capital reflect the perspectives of different stakeholders, and Knowledge Management is about fueling the dynamics across these concerns, and providing toolkits such as Social Network Analysis to measure them. KM should power the organization, and the promise of KM should not be, as it got it’s poor reputation for in the late 90’s for being, a way to sell glorified databases that ignored all any human aspects of interaction in work.

In my mind much of the KM literature is sound, and many KM ideas have never yet made it into software, so KM shouldn’t be judged solely from KM implementations, even though many massively over-promised in the early days.

The importance of the differing depth of understanding and priorities of people in leadership positions across the firm can too easily be underestimated. While the VP of HR should care about people, people are not a lead concern for the VPs of Marketing, Technology or Finance. They have their own portfolios of concerns to worry about.

While a great social media platform bolsters all functions, the story needed to sell into the different functions needs to lead with each of those departmental concerns, and break those concerns down into how allowing your people to converse, surface notions, collectively plan and collectively refine makes a difference to the VPs goals. Ironically, social media make the biggest impact at the pan-organizational level, for whom only the CEO has prime concern.

Organizations make progress where people put their focus. But too few people are able (often due to lack of skills or time) or willing (due to incentives) to focus on the big picture. Many don’t see or consider the big picture because people around them don’t. And what we don’t understand we filter out. What results is a morass of people all pushing parts of something they don’t understand. Maybe the greatest gift of the new generations of workers is their fresh perspective and questioning.

Knowledge Management as a discipline provides frameworks for understanding some of the dynamics of the big picture: from a strategy standpoint building the types of capital, from the individual, group and organizational levels. Much of KM theory was developed way before this Web 2.0 stuff came along yet many products and practitioners are unaware of just how many KM aspects have been reinvented in Web 2.0.

So like I said in Knowledge management is dead. Long live Knowledge Management, thank goodness the KM incarnations from the late 90’s are dead and buried, but, make no mistake, this discipline is alive and kicking.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 4th, 2007 at 11:14 pm and is filed under MBA, Collaboration, Knowledge Management, Organizational Alignment, Organizational Transparency, Knowledge Retention, Enterprise Software. 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.