Humanizing Knowledge Management
Knowledge management (KM) strategies are doomed to failure unless they take into consideration the way human beings actually learn and interact. Although that seems obvious, it's taken some time for business people and KM gurus to fully appreciate the fact.
Two books have recently driven home this point. One is In Good Company: How Social Capital Makes Organizations Work, coauthored by Don Cohen and Lawrence Prusak of IBM's Institute for Knowledge Management. KM is the capturing, transferring and leveraging of what employees know, and many firms have viewed this as primarily an information systems challenge. They've spent a lot of money buying and building systems and then trying to pack information inside of them for KM purposes. What some experts have found, however, is that technology is secondary. People, or at least the social connections among them, are the genuine key of good knowledge management.
The authors write that social capital consists of "the stock of active connections among people: the trust, mutual understanding, and shared values and behaviors that bind the members of human networks and communities and make cooperative action possible." Companies with the right amounts of social capital (too much may result in clannishness) enjoy many benefits, including an improved ability to share knowledge. Technology can aid human networks, but it can't substitute for them. In Information Outlook magazine, Prusak warns that the trend toward virtualization, if taken too far, can erode social capital and, therefore, effective knowledge sharing. He says of information professionals: "They should participate in building networks and nurturing communities, and work to create situations where people can meet each other. They should get to know who knows what and share that knowledge with other people."
Another book about the tight connections between people and knowledge management is The Social Life of Information by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid. They argue that knowledge and information are inseparable from the details of how people communicate, learn, and think. They look at how knowledge moves across regions and how the relationships between people and their companies work. And they argue that, to the degree that KM hasn't lived up to the hype, it's because there's been a disregard for the realities of how people interact with each other and with information itself.
Like Prusak, they're skeptical of unencumbered virtualization. They point, for example, to the experience of the advertising firm Chiat/Day, which moved to abandon traditional workstations in favor of mobile employees with no set workspaces to call their own. The resulting confusion and turf wars, they argue, suggest that the proper management of workspace is often crucial to effective knowledge sharing.
They also cite the research on "communities of practice," which shows that learning isn't just a matter of acquiring information. These communities are groups that often emerge around a specific work- related discipline or problem. They're defined by whatever subject naturally interests the members of that community. The authors give the example of Xerox field service representatives, who tended to ignore the explicit knowledge-based tools and processes provided by their company. Instead, they relied on informal collaboration and individual expertise. Rather than trying to get the reps to change their natural patterns of knowledge sharing, Xerox gave them mobile phones with which they could discuss problems with one another while they worked. The company also gave them more opportunities to socialize and share stories about how they work.
In the long run, the term "knowledge management" may turn out to be a misnomer. Much of corporate knowledge can't truly be managed. Instead, knowledge often finds its own way through organizations, filtered and shaped by human nature. And this insight is itself wending its way through companies today, changing assumptions about how businesses can tap into their rich reservoirs of knowledge.
For an article recounting the ten-year progress of the concepts of knowledge management and intellectual capital, see
http://www.fortune.com/indexw.jhtml?channel=artcol.jhtml&doc_id=202564
For an article on communities of practice, see
http://www.co-i-l.com/coil/knowledge-garden/cop/lss.shtml
For a summary of "How to Invest in Social Capital," see
http://www.hbsp.harvard.edu/products/hbr/jun01/R0106E.html
For an article on how knowledge management should evolve to focus more on wisdom, see
http://www.fortune.com/indexw.jhtml?channel=artcol.jhtml&doc_id=205387
For a link to the Institute of Knowledge Management, see
http://www.vistacompass.com/ikm_public/index.htm
For an article on the Chiat/Day virtual office experience, see
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/7.02/chiat.html
Two books have recently driven home this point. One is In Good Company: How Social Capital Makes Organizations Work, coauthored by Don Cohen and Lawrence Prusak of IBM's Institute for Knowledge Management. KM is the capturing, transferring and leveraging of what employees know, and many firms have viewed this as primarily an information systems challenge. They've spent a lot of money buying and building systems and then trying to pack information inside of them for KM purposes. What some experts have found, however, is that technology is secondary. People, or at least the social connections among them, are the genuine key of good knowledge management.
The authors write that social capital consists of "the stock of active connections among people: the trust, mutual understanding, and shared values and behaviors that bind the members of human networks and communities and make cooperative action possible." Companies with the right amounts of social capital (too much may result in clannishness) enjoy many benefits, including an improved ability to share knowledge. Technology can aid human networks, but it can't substitute for them. In Information Outlook magazine, Prusak warns that the trend toward virtualization, if taken too far, can erode social capital and, therefore, effective knowledge sharing. He says of information professionals: "They should participate in building networks and nurturing communities, and work to create situations where people can meet each other. They should get to know who knows what and share that knowledge with other people."
Another book about the tight connections between people and knowledge management is The Social Life of Information by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid. They argue that knowledge and information are inseparable from the details of how people communicate, learn, and think. They look at how knowledge moves across regions and how the relationships between people and their companies work. And they argue that, to the degree that KM hasn't lived up to the hype, it's because there's been a disregard for the realities of how people interact with each other and with information itself.
Like Prusak, they're skeptical of unencumbered virtualization. They point, for example, to the experience of the advertising firm Chiat/Day, which moved to abandon traditional workstations in favor of mobile employees with no set workspaces to call their own. The resulting confusion and turf wars, they argue, suggest that the proper management of workspace is often crucial to effective knowledge sharing.
They also cite the research on "communities of practice," which shows that learning isn't just a matter of acquiring information. These communities are groups that often emerge around a specific work- related discipline or problem. They're defined by whatever subject naturally interests the members of that community. The authors give the example of Xerox field service representatives, who tended to ignore the explicit knowledge-based tools and processes provided by their company. Instead, they relied on informal collaboration and individual expertise. Rather than trying to get the reps to change their natural patterns of knowledge sharing, Xerox gave them mobile phones with which they could discuss problems with one another while they worked. The company also gave them more opportunities to socialize and share stories about how they work.
In the long run, the term "knowledge management" may turn out to be a misnomer. Much of corporate knowledge can't truly be managed. Instead, knowledge often finds its own way through organizations, filtered and shaped by human nature. And this insight is itself wending its way through companies today, changing assumptions about how businesses can tap into their rich reservoirs of knowledge.
For an article recounting the ten-year progress of the concepts of knowledge management and intellectual capital, see
http://www.fortune.com/indexw.jhtml?channel=artcol.jhtml&doc_id=202564
For an article on communities of practice, see
http://www.co-i-l.com/coil/knowledge-garden/cop/lss.shtml
For a summary of "How to Invest in Social Capital," see
http://www.hbsp.harvard.edu/products/hbr/jun01/R0106E.html
For an article on how knowledge management should evolve to focus more on wisdom, see
http://www.fortune.com/indexw.jhtml?channel=artcol.jhtml&doc_id=205387
For a link to the Institute of Knowledge Management, see
http://www.vistacompass.com/ikm_public/index.htm
For an article on the Chiat/Day virtual office experience, see
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/7.02/chiat.html