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March 26, 2008

Who Knows how to Manage Knowledge Management?

The initial impetus for practicing knowledge management as a discipline is to Effect a different outcome from what has already otherwise been obtained.

Best practices of knowledge management are meant to Affect the approaches to gaining the target outcome.

Question behind the outcome: "Why should knowledge be managed?"

Answer: knowledge has proved to be a resource that is critical to efficiently determining a two-part condition:
- when solution options exist and
- which options are optimal.
In the past, opportunity and quality have both suffered because effective knowledge was not available to be incorporated in a timely way during investigations and decision-making.

The goal of managing knowledge is to achieve timely discovery and acquisition of quality-checked knowledge for use during "live" investigation and decisioning.

It is important to recognize that investigation and decisioning are "constants" across a wide range of distinctive eforts:
- development (design, build)
- analysis (assess, interpret)
- auditing (measure, validate)

The management discipline provides people (roles), processes and tools to facilitate the following treatments of knowledge:
1 - discovery/generation
2 - QA
3 - acquisition/distribution
4 - lifecycle control (content versioning and retirement)

Practices within the discipline are "best" when they accomplish the following two things:
- they manage to align each of the four treatments individually with the operational environment that is meant to be sustained by executive influence (or group culture),
- but the practices align them in a way that allows each treatment to align with the other treatments (!) -- especially so that you get a chain linkage from 1 to 4 that allows 4 to also loop back as a "supplier" to 1.

With this overview, it is possible to understand where most of the phenomena that are now associated with KM should be able to fit in, and to simultaneously recognize that the various phenomena can be creatively "fitted in" to exploit special circumstances such as existing resources, emergencies, enthusiasm, or general curiosity and inventiveness. Those circumstances should be governed by a higher-level strategy. The typical phenomena include collaboration, multimedia (rich content), social networks, semantic search, library science, and games.

Any KM effort that is more than exploratory will run up against the challenge of organizational change, and that change will itself need to be managed. The more important it is for knowledge management to succeed, the more important it is to understand the implications of the current state of executive or culture influence versus their desired future state. Knowledge Management (KM) may indeed participate in changing those aspects, but it should be assumed that those aspects predetermine KM's likely prosperity and scope in the organization.

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at March 26, 2008 10:29 AM