Why Knowledge Management?

CMS Review

Every couple of months, I contemplate whether or not I should take the time to re-review some of the Content Management Systems (CMS) that I had looked at a few years ago.

Recently, there has been a fair amount of traffic at this site about the Demise of KM, but the CMS reviews done several years ago - particularly those on RedDot and Ektron continue to get the most amount of search engine hits bringing people to this blog.  So I continue debating.

Meanwhile, anyone wanting a truly thorough review of the top CMS applications (about 1000 pages) in the industry should visit CMS Watch, their 2009 Web CMS Review is now available. A 67 page 'preview' can be downloaded for free, but anyone looking to spend any amount of money on a CMS (and even with an Open Source solution, you will still pay to have it customized), should invest in the full report. It reviews and compares 42 Content Management Systems, including Open Source, inexpensive commercial applications, mid-range solutions and the high-end powerhouses.

KM Wars

The disruption that is incubating between KM and the various processes and market segments that are generally considered to be KM-related, continues to grow.

A recent link from David Gurteen's blog led me to a really fascinating article at the Enterprise 2.0 Blog site. Social Media vs. Knowledge Management: A Generational War written by Venkatesh Rao is a very thought provoking thesis. It's long, but well worth the read. While the argument that the war between Social Media and KM is generational (Boomers vs Gen-Xers vs Millenials) bears some resemblance to actuality, it is a bit far-reaching, but an engaging description of what's happening in the industry. The arguments put forth about Social Media and Knowledge Management, and the technologies that support them, is an illuminating read.

As before....depending on viewpoint, Social Media will continue to be associated with KM, or an attempt is made to separate them.

But how is this helpful or constructive?

I haven't figured that out yet other to know that as we define things further, and discern the similarities and differences, we can better define the lines of KM.

Near the end of the day today, I received my Basex TechWatch newsletter, billed as "A Weekly Monitor and Digest of the Knowledge Economy." It is one of the key eZines that I read all the time, and has been the source of a lot of useful knowledge. But when I got to the end, where they list announcements that they track, the categories were as follows: Content Management, Desktop Productivity, Knowledge-enabled CRM, Collaboration, Social Software, Mobility, Voice Processing, Business Process Management, Cloud Computing, and Application Development Environments. Broad stokes....certainly impactful on the mangement of knowledge, but very diverse categories.

The Demise of KM - Supplemental

Every once in a while, I have to wonder if my posts (such as the Demise of KM Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3) have anything to do with the real world issues that others are experiencing or writing about. 

So this morning's Google Alerts on "Knowledge Management" brought a post from Daniel Tunkelang of The Noisy Channel on Knowledge Management is a Process. Daniel was praising Lynda Moulton for taking on CIO Magazine (one of its authors) for proclaiming that “search is being implemented in enterprises as the new knowledge management” and her (Lynda's) response that “knowledge management (KM) is not now, nor has it ever been, a software product or even a suite of products” (more on Lynda's post here).  Well of course not...

Planning, Organizing, Leading and Controlling are what the Business schools teach as the components of Management philosophy. Each of these pieces of management can be done just fine without any software tools....Physical clip boards, manual Gantt charts, and a stop watch (time-motion studies) worked just fine until better methods such VisiCalc, Lotus Notes, and MS Project came along. Yeah, software does not an industry make - software is just an enabler to better perform the required function.

So one problem that Knowledge Management has is a lack of definition. After years of evolving management philosophy, the 4 concepts above are generally agreed as components of management (with only slight disagreement or refinement of terms). However, look at Wikipedia and how it shotguns KM:

"improved performance, competitive advantage, innovation, developmental processes, lessons learnt transfer...and the general development of collaborative practices. Knowledge Management is frequently linked...to...learning organisation, lifelong learning, and continuous improvement."

Add that to the concept of where KM belongs:

Many large companies have resources dedicated to Knowledge Management, often as a part of Information Technology, Human Resource Management, or Business Strategy departments.

And so we get, as I have described, any number of technologies looking to enable the processes that facilitate the mangement of knowledge. The various components of managing knowledge (after action review, storytelling, knowledge capture, content management) then get cross-bred with IT, HR, and Strategy solutions, adding exponentially to the products available to help 'manage knowledge.'

Even in a simplistic KM definition of "capture, codify and disseminate knowledge to stimulate knowledge re-use or innovation," we invite a lot of interpretation for ways to enable that process. Some Vendors, or the general public, revolt against aligning software under KM, while other quickly add their product name to the KM list.

The key is that we must always remember what Daniel has said, which is that Knowledge Management is a process...and still a developing philosophy....all else is merely the means to the end.  

In this day and age, how broad the paint brush strokes will typically be defined by vendors and policed by users. 

The Demise of KM - Part 3

10 years ago, I was introduced to the Knowledge Management industry, and shortly thereafter signed on to run the US Office for a KM vendor....(check out the story about vendors ).

In 1998, it seemed as if anything that moved was positioned under Knowledge Management: Content Management, Storytelling, Social Networks, Digital Asset Management, Brainstorming, Communities of Practice, Intellectual Property RIghts Management, Wikis, and Search (the company I worked for had a natural language, neural-network-enhanced search engine) just to name a few.

At that time, if you had a product in one of those categories, you were a KM product.

While in 1998 a burgeoning industry was all trying to aggregate under the banner of Knowledge Management, there is now a growing segregation in process. Most recently are white papers by InQuira on (Knowledge Management System) KMS vs. CMS (Content Management System), and one by CMSWatch on CM vs KM vs DAM et al.  Additionally the KNOW Network published a Social Networking vs. Knowledge Management perspective. Search - as anyone can attest - is certainly a market in and of itself.

It seems that processes and technologies that were once lining up under KM are now eclipsing KM in their own right. Of course, the processes and the technologies surrounding these sectors are all different, even if they are not positioned 'versus' one another.

The demise of Knowledge Management will not be due to any lack of need for KM processes - witness the coming brain drain and the value of things such as Social Networks (and how vendors are trying to move Social Networking into the office) - no, KM is only threatened by its lack of ability to establish a secure identity of its own.

We'll see.

Note on the Seven Principles of KM

It appears that my link to the original author's post at Cognitive Edge is not available, so in order to capture the knowledge here for future use, I am listing the 7 principles without any descriptions that should be available at the author's posting on Rendering Knowledge. Hopefully I can at least link to David Snowden's blog to find the details on the principles when I need full access.

• Knowledge can only be volunteered it cannot be conscripted.
• We only know what we know when we need to know it.
• In the context of real need few people will withhold their knowledge.
• Everything is fragmented.
• Tolerated failure imprints learning better than success.
• The way we know things is not the way we report we know things.
• We always know more than we can say, and we will always say more than we can write down.

I generally hate to capture this much of a post, but do not want to be without a reference to this hard earned knowledge. Great stuff.