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October 16, 2006

Harmonic Convergence

Welcome to the harmonic convergence of new-wave KM where, in the (flawed) holy triumvirate of People/Process/Technology, it's sometimes hard to tell whether the people are processing technology, or whether its the technology that is processing the people.

By now, it is already mainstream to think of blending blogs, wikis, search, and business intelligence into a hyperethos of "smarts". IT industry writers such as Michael Vizard at Ziff Davis go so far as to say, "This means that companies for the first time might actually be able to figure out who knows what, and when, within their organizations in real time."

Academics haven't changed their outlook a bit, however. Serious researchers rightly refuse to confuse data, information, and knowledge, understanding that crucial transformations must occur in order to get from data to info, and from info to knowledge. Taking that as a cue, and as the only one that we need, our understanding of a "process" for managing knowledge clearly embraces an expectation that systems will be developed to power and control those transformations.

Is it just me, or do you agree that the Card Catalog is still where the bar got set in knowledge management systems? When I was five years old, I learned how to use it and it worked for forty years virtually unchanged. It even withstood, without blinking, the unmeasured nuclear explosion of bad poetry brought on by the advent of the home word processor. I sometimes wonder why "management" people are so eager to dismiss the discipline of library science and insist on hot dates with so-called "self-managing" or "organic" content.

That is, let's not forget that the user-community for knowledge is not homogenous, and even unscientifically it can be confidently separated into roles like managers, knowledge workers and line workers. In a business, these roles are distinct, are actually held to some standards of accountability, and a lot of what passes as "process" exists mainly to avoid having these roles waste time. These aren't per se "knowledge management" processes -- they're work management processes. Knowledge isn't supposed to be magical; it's supposed to be practical. How does it get that way?

Interestingly, the card catalog is brutally efficient. It just doesn't work well until you learn how to use it. But when you've learned, it works for two key reasons: one, it has built in accounting; and two, everything it knows about is formally published. Let's see: if you were paying someone out of your pocket to be responsible for assuring those two characteristics, do you think you might call them a "knowledge manager"?

I'd sure hate to go into a library where the catalog was missing, the shelves had all fallen over, and anyone could arrive and poke around adding, moving, or removing whatever other materials they wanted. Unless, of course, I was there for recreation. Oh wait, that's why we surf the web!

But surfing on my boss's dime is a little different, don't you think? If newer and newer technology is going to bring about maturity in new-wave KM, the technology is going to have to get primarily focussed on making management processes better, and only secondarily on making more and more spontaneous content sources continuously reachable. In a business, the purpose of KM is to integrate two proceses, content management and work management , in order to improve the content of work! Until then, the convergence of the technology innovations is going to continue increasing the dissonance instead of the harmony, the noise instead of the signal.

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at October 16, 2006 9:08 AM

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