Knowledge Management is a term that many people dislike, myself included. Firstly it's a misnomer - you can't "manage", at an organization or corporate level, something as subjective and contextual as knowledge. It's even debatable whether you can manage knowledge at a personal level - because we don't always know what we know.
Secondly, the term 'knowledge management' has become one of those awful IT cliche buzz words - like (my personal favourite) "leverage" and "portal". People who want to sound important in IT business meetings, but actually know little about IT, use buzz words frequently. e.g. "Yes we are addressing that with our new Knowledge Management initiatives, which will leverage off our Web Portal."
But despite these faults, the term 'knowledge management' is widely accepted as the name of a business discipline (alongside 'accounting' and 'marketing' and so forth). So it makes sense to go with the flow and continue to use the term. Indeed I've done so in my own weblog categorisation, which mostly matches the community topic mapping applications I use. It isn't my purpose here to try and change the term 'knowledge management'. I do however want to try and grasp what exactly is knowledge management and how is it done in the real world?
I came across an interesting paper that debunks some myths about KM. Written by Professor T.D. Wilson of the University of Sheffield, the paper is provocatively entitled The nonsense of 'knowledge management'. The professor researched journal papers that had the term 'knowledge management' in their titles and he found that the occurance of such papers grew exponentially from 1997 onward. His data takes us to 2002, which was the peak but also showed signs of a slow-down. Professor Wilson discovered the following tendencies among the journals he researched (nb: I've separated the points into a numbered list):
1. A concern with information technology.
2. A tendency to elide the distinction between 'knowledge' (what I know) and 'information' (what I am able to convey about what I know).
3. Confusion of the management of work practices in the organization with the management of knowledge.
The 3 things above aren't the Professor's conclusions, just an excerpt I've selected that covers what I consider to be 3 key points. His actual conclusion later in that paper is that KM is a "management fad, promulgated mainly by certain consultancy companies". That may be so, but I'm more interested in what KM is in practice in the business world.
I want to pick up on the third point from above, "management of work practices in the organization". This is dismissed by Professor Wilson in his conclusion as a "Utopian idea", but I believe it is a practical way forward for KM. The current crop of personal content management and 'social software' tools (weblogs, wikis, etc) go some way to giving individual workers control over their information gathering and sharing. It's by no means a perfect solution - I've written before that I'm skeptical about how many 'normal' people (i.e. non-geeks) will use these technologies. But even so, technologies such as weblogs do emphasize subjectivity and context - which as I mentioned at the beginning of this post are two main tenets of 'knowledge'.
One of the best articles I've seen on KM was written a week or so ago by Dave Pollard. He entitled it Confessions of a CKO: What I should have done. As the title indicates, Dave used to be a "Chief Knowledge Officer" (at Ernst & Young I think? if so, then it's one of the consultancy firms that Professor Wilson picked on in his paper!). In a previous article, Dave had outlined his principles of KM and in this latest article he tackles the processes. They are grounded in the following observation:
"...I realized that we have been looking at it all wrong, from above, from a systems perspective, instead of from ground level, from an activity level."
Which is another of saying that KM should be bottom-up, rather than top-down - a theme that I've written on before (as have many others in the blogging world).
What really grabbed me about Dave's article was his ideal "job description" for KM - or "Work Effectiveness Improvement" as he re-named it. He outlined 6 bullet points and I've decided to crudely cut out the action points from those, which ironically loses the context somewhat. But generally speaking there are far too few KM action points in the world (as opposed to reams and reams of KM theory). So here goes:
1. Introduce personal content management and social networking tools.
2. Provide personalized training, tools, suggested processes and 'cheat sheets' to workers; plus provide recommendations for more systematic changes.
3. Establish standards, procedures, filters and measurements to reduce unnecessary e-mails, information flows, paperwork, meetings and interruptions.
4. Develop voluntary training programs.
5. Assess the aggregate cost to the organization of information; and objectively evaluate information adequacy, quality, and overload, and recommend changes to tools, repositories, and processes.
6. Develop a set of Work Effectiveness Principles.
The key point I take away from Dave Pollard's article and Professor Wilson's paper is that Knowledge Management isn't just a term to be used and abused in management meetings and journal papers. Knowledge Management - despite being mis-named - is a personal, collaborative, active 'doing word'. It is founded on subjectivity and context.
Let me put it this way: Knowledge Management should be a verb, not (as the word 'management' implies) a noun.
Our jobs as KM researchers or practitioners is to enable that in organizational settings. Now... if only I could get such a job! I'm currently a Web Producer, but I much prefer working at the Analysis and Strategy level. So I'd be interested to know how Dave Pollard worked his way to be a CKO, as that's something I'd like to aim towards.
I'd be interested in feedback from readers as to how one gets a job in the KM area. Do you work as a KM [something]? What do you do in your job to enable 'knowledge management'?
In my previous post, Stasis and Synchronicity, I scratched the surface of something that's been bothering me recently. I've been sensing a degree of stasis in the blogging world, not to mention in my own life (and given what I wrote 12 days ago about weblogs being avatars, perhaps the two are intermingled). I finished my previous post with a rhyming play-on-words: I swapped 'MTV' for 'synchronicity' in the famous Dire Straits tune Money for Nothing. That came straight from my subconscious - and at the time I didn't fully know what it meant. Which for me is an invitation to explore...
Synchronicity is a term made famous by the psychiatrist Carl Jung. He defined synchronicity as an "occurrence of a meaningful coincidence in time". Further, it as "an acausal connecting principle". Which is to say that a connection occurs through the sharing of a common meaning, not because one event caused the other. Jung went so far as to boldly state that "synchronicity could thus be added as a fourth principle to the triad of space, time, and causality".
Synchronicity has come to mean a variety of things. Laurence Boldt claims that synchronicity reflects the "underlying interconnectedness of all things within the Universe" [my emphasis]. An attractive theory for those of us addicted to Web culture! Stephen J. Davis states that synchronicity is "a very personal and subjective observation of this inter-connected universe of which we are but a small part". Another keyword that pops up in writings about synchronicity is "flow" - which of course reminds me of the Web's Information Flow. When used to describe synchronicity, it's all about the "flow of life". For example, this quote:
"When we are in the flow we experience more synchronous events, more pleasure and less pain. The flow of coincidences is our path to higher ground."
What I was trying to express in my previous post was that sometimes we become too insular, too caught up in our routines. Specifically in the blogging world we get stuck inside the confines of our RSS Aggregators and we miss out on the synchronicity in other parts of the Web - and indeed in other forms of Art. Synchronicity to me means looking for meaningful coincidences in multimedia, literature, music, art, heck even television. So in this sense synchronicity means to go outside the blog world and explore other worlds. The greater your exposure to different ideas, the more likely you are to formulate new ideas.
Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, Glassdog ;-)
In my travels on this topic, I came across this comment which nicely complements my point:
"If you look for it, you will start to see parallels in all kinds of things -- religion, physics, art, philosophy, psychology, music, etc.. There is a pattern to it all - the synchronicity. Once you notice the parallels, you might apply what you know about one thing to another and have a New Idea (or just enjoy the moment to a greater extent)."
There's a similar concept to synchronicity that has done the rounds of the blogosphere before: serendipity, or "making fortunate discoveries by accident". The day after I published my previous post, Stasis and Synchronicity, I came across some old weblog posts on the topic of serendipity. Anil Dash linked to an old Six Apart post from December 2002, which in turn linked back to a bunch of posts from early 2002 - from old school bloggers Jon Udell, Sam Ruby, Anil Dash and Rebecca Blood. Their theme was that blogging is "changing the way we look for information", in the words of Mena Trott. Rebecca Blood called it "pointing readers to things that they didn't know they wanted to see".
And it's hard to argue against that - I've learned a lot of things I'd never have discovered if it weren't for weblogs. By subscribing to smart people, like the ones on my blogroll, I make serendipitous discoveries nearly every day through the stories they write and the things they link to. But I need more. As I mentioned above, the blog world sometimes can be too insular and so stasis sets in. To get back the synchronicity, I want to explore outside...
I'm going to try and eat my own dogfood on this over the next month or so, by delving into things outside the blogging world. Particularly literature, which is my drug of choice. But also multimedia, music and other art forms. In fact, thinking about synchronicity so much over the last week has led me to come up with some themes that would be best explored in a novel. Hmmm, now there's an idea.
Jeffrey Zeldman wrote today about Glassdog's transformation from an "experimental narrative powerhouse" to a mere blog. Under the provocative title The saddest music in the world, Zeldman's piece was a reflection on how The Web has not lived up to its original promise:
"Oh, little child. Long ago, before you were born, some of us dreamed big dreams. We thought the simplicity of HTML and the low cost of web hosting would produce a worldwide creative flowering. A second Renaissance, every person an inventor and publisher. Magazines, communities, visual experiments. New narrative forms. Interactive jam sessions. In-depth explorations of every imaginable topic, from Leadbelly discographies to single parent self-help resources. This we envisioned. This we soldiered for. And what did we get?
Blogs, Gmail, and Friendster."
This topic has been simmering in my own mind, like heroin on the boil, for some time now. Coincidentally I came across an old Tim Berners-Lee document earlier this week, entitled Realising the Full Potential of the Web ( from December 1997). This quote nicely complements Zeldman's point:
"I want the Web to be much more creative than it is at the moment. I have even had to coin a new word - Intercreativity - which means building things together on the Web."
I've long been a fan of Tim Berners-Lee's vision for the Web, particularly his principle that the Web should be read/write and not read-only. The original web browser that he created back in 1990, called WorldWideWeb, was designed to browse and edit. You've heard this spiel before from me, so let's cut to the chase: Zeldman is absolutely spot-on, The Web in 2004 is suffering from a dearth of artistic creativity.
Zeldman uses the term "Renaissance" to express the ideal that he and others strived towards in the early-to-mid 90's. Renaissance means "cultural and scientific rebirth" according to the Wikipedia. Another definition of Renaissance that I like is this:
A revival of intellectual or artistic achievement and vigor
So Zeldman is lamenting the lack of artistic creativity on the Web - "visual experiments", "new narrative forms", "interactive jam sessions" and so on. But is it fair to pin the blame on blogs? Are blogs boring? Matt Mullenweg pointed out that weblogs are revolutionary because they drastically lower the barrier to writing on the Web. That's true. But the content on most blogs isn't very revolutionary, at least if you compare it to literature and art in the English Renaissance (for example).
I think Zeldman may even be saying the blog format, maybe even the whole blogging zeitgeist at this time, is restricting creativity. And it's a fact that the vast majority of weblogs follow the same format: reverse-chronological, short and pithy posts, loads of linky love within each community, blogrolls, linkblogs, and so on. Most bloggers conform to these things. The same is true of web design as it relates to weblogs - you see a lot of 2-column, fixed width and centred designs. There are variations on that theme, but they usually don't deviate far.
That's the word for it. And the Dictionary.com definition of stasis touches on the theme of this post:
A condition of balance among various forces; motionlessness: "Language is a primary element of culture, and stasis in the arts is tantamount to death" (Charles Marsh).
In another coincidence, I've been thinking about stasis lately as it relates to my life in the real world. Every morning, Monday to Friday, I catch a bus from my home to the train station, then I catch a train into Wellington city to my work. Before I arrive at work, I buy a muffin at the cafe just down the road. Then I go into the office and sit down at my desk. I turn on my computer, read my emails, check my weblog for comments, eat my muffin, browse Bloglines for a bit, go and get a coffee (filtered), go back to my desk - where I sit and work for the next 8 hours. When my working day is over, I take the train and bus back to my home, spend time with my family, and then spend a couple of hours in front of my home computer - reading Bloglines and writing on my blog.
That's my routine during weekdays. And I'm feeling the stasis of it. I know this because deviations in the bus and train schedules make my palms sweaty. I rely on the two to be on time you see, otherwise my bus misses its connecting train (or vice versa). And that throws my routine off, which makes me stressed. Sometimes I wonder if I'm going to spend the rest of my life working in an office 8 hours a day. Stasis.
I think we need more synchronicity in the Web world. This is just a hunch right now, but I have a feeling we've gotten too comfortable with our RSS Aggregators. We rely on them to find content to read, when we should be venturing out into the wider Web, or the world of multimedia, or the musical or literature realms. Here's the Wikipedia definition of synchronicity:
Synchronicity is a term used by the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung to describe the alignment of universal forces with one's own life experience. Jung believed that some, but not all, coincidences were not mere chance, but instead a literal "co-inciding", or alignment of forces in the universe to create an event or circumstance. The process of becoming intuitively aware and acting in harmony with these forces is what Jung labelled "individuation." Jung said that an individuated person would actually shape events around them through the communication of their consciousness with the collective unconscious.
Synchronicity is "magical thinking" and we need more of it on the Web.
I want to align myself with the creative forces on the Web, and in my life. Sing to the tune of I want my MTV:
I want my, I want my, I want my synchronicity {Repeat, ad lib to fade}
That's the title of my second NZ Computerworld article, which is in this week's edition (pg 16). Here's a PDF copy of it. It's also available in HTML format on Read/Write Web.
Since it is an article that attempts to bring RSS into a mainstream light, some people who arrive here may not know how to "subscribe" to an RSS feed. My advice is to select a browser-based RSS Aggregator - I recommend Bloglines - and then copy-and-paste the RSS feed URL into it. For example, my RSS feed URL is:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/rss.xml
I've noticed recently that Atom (a new RSS format) is making it easier for normal users to subscribe to a feed, by providing a graphical HTML version of the feed. So instead of the user clicking on the Atom URL and being greeting with a screenful of XML code (as is the case with RSS), the user gets a nicely formatted HTML page - which usually has instructions on how to subscribe to the feed. This IMHO could be Atom's killer app, so I'm following the progress of this feature with interest.
Today I saw for the first time an HTML-styled Atom feed that works in Internet Explorer - a big deal considering 90-95% of people use the Microsoft browser. For an example see this Atom feed by the Creative Generalist blog. A few weeks ago Mark Pilgrim showed off his HTML-styled Atom feed, but at that point it only worked in Mozilla browsers. However I see that it too now works in Internet Explorer. Keep an eye on this new development, because it may be the breakthrough feature Atom needs to gain some ground on the popular RSS 2.0.
