RSS feedsMost discussions of knowledge management (KM) pay lip service to the idea that it can’t be managed, then talk endlessly about IT systems that supposedly support it. You know the sort of things: knowledge capture, information and content management, search, tagging, taxonomies, and so on. However, social tools such as forums, wikis and microblogging are more likely to be the killer supporting tools for KM.
It is important to separate information and knowledge. Once data has been processed and patterns emerge, it becomes useful information to people who can make sense of it. They possess the necessary knowledge to interpret the information and set it in context. They may then share their knowledge or insights from the process with others, at which point it becomes information again.
The rest of the inbound data and information has now become waste, which may or may not nourish future seekers of information. A lot of IT energy goes into storing and backing up this stuff, a sort of digital slag heap. It’s often kept just in case it’s needed, which is great news for storage vendors, but not for organisations.
We need to consider what we’re trying to do with KM. It has to be something like “to enable people to make the most informed decisions in the most timely fashion”.
Few people, especially in business, can get hold of all the information they need by plundering frozen-in-time forum discussions or using a search engine (external or internal). Some information will always remain beyond timely reach, no matter how you phrase the search. Then, by far the quickest way to get an answer is to ask someone who can either tell you or knows where it can be found.
We need to create an environment in which such knowledge can be readily accessed. A lot of it is between people’s ears, which is where the social stuff comes in. We’ve always “asked Fred” and Fred has been happy to help – it takes only seconds of his time and saves hours of yours. Nowadays it is possible for all those Freds to be online, tagged and accessible to those who need to reach them. And (this is the culturally tough bit) they need to make themselves available on a grander scale to complete strangers. Mind you, Fred can use the questioner’s own profile page to decide how best to respond.
Businesses of all kinds are undergoing a slow culture change, sometimes in pools of common interest and sometimes in the organisation as a whole. True knowledge managers will be able to take a holistic view of their organisation’s commercial, human, information and knowledge needs and create a suitable environment for this change to happen. It will comprise both online and offline activities: meetings, brainstorming sessions, forums, discussion groups, e-learning resources, work shadowing, blogs, microblogs, wikis, profiles, instant messaging, even email.
Experts who are asked something more than once might prefer to write a blog post to point new enquirers to. A disparate group of people wrestling with a common problem might choose to hold an online chat using something like Twitter.
Knowledge is exchanged and built on: the flow takes it out of their head as information, back into someone else’s where it blends with their knowledge and comes out as fresh information, and so on. It could be an intense hour.
Or thousands might participate in a knowledge jam over several days. Insights and recommended actions can be written up and made available to participants, especially those prepared to capitalise on it.
The underlying intention of knowledge sharing is to enable its timely re-use. Without question, social tools will become a core element of the knowledge manager’s armoury.
David Tebbutt is an IT industry watcher
