Re: Is KM a Fad - It depends on whether you capitalise it!

["Bill Hall" <bill -dot- hall -at- hotkey -dot- net -dot- au>]

Rajeeva noted the following:

> I recently read an interesting article titled “The Fad that forgot the
people” which talks about re-engineering and how it went wrong. The article
can be found at http://www.fastcompany.com/online/01/reengin.html
> The author of the article is Thomas H. Davenport and published by Fast
company Magazine.
>
> In recent times there has been a great interest and drive towards
Knowledge Management (KM) and its importance in organizations. Most document
management systems and similar technologies claim that their products are
tools for Knowledge management. Is this true?? Can Knowledge Management be a
Fad like re-engineering? Is it just a passing stage in technology
enhancement or is it really here to stay? Is KM technology really worth all
this fuss?? After all knowledge management existed in organizations before
all these technologies came to existence. Therefore will this be just
another passing stage where tech-companies make a quick buck? Wasn’t this
true during the days of re-engineering? What do you think?

I can't not respond to this, since Rajeeva and I will undoubtedly meet up
one of these days in a KM seminar at Monash, where I have recently been
appointed an Adjunct Fellow in Knowledge Management.

In answering this, I am speaking from my own experience in Australia's
largest defence contractor. I have just finished my involvement in a
complete Knowledge Management Audit covering our entire organization from
Melbourne and Sydney to Perth via Canberra, Albury-Wodonga and Adelaide
(i.e., East Coast to West Coast and most of the capitol cities in between.
Before Christmas I was also involved in a survey of our information
management requirements for engineering and logistics disciplines.

Tenix is primarily a manager of engineering projects ranging from multi
billion dollar projects down to some that earn less than $10,000. Most of
what we do depends on people's knowledge and our profitability depends on
how well we marshal that knowledge to win and complete projects. In some
areas we are state of the art, in others we can clearly improve the way we
manage the knowledge we require to complete our work.

In this sense, knowledge management is certainly not a fad, it is absolutely
critical to the survival of our organization. Call this lowercase "km".

However, I believe that Rajeeva is probably referring to the formal
discipline of organisational Knowledge Management (KM in caps) as pushed by
the likes of IBM and the big consulting organizations. <RANT> My tentative
conclusion from studying a lot that has been published on the Web under the
KM banner is that a lot of people waving this flag are mainly selling high
priced consultants or applications, and don't even know what knowledge is.
There are many cases of people wearing the emperor's new clothes - as I have
said in my draft paper on Knowledge in Knowledge Management. On the other
hand, there is at least one person who clearly knows something about
knowledge, whose Master Class I attended a couple of weeks ago. I would
willingly shell out my own cash for his next class which will cover some
different ground. Google will give you some hits on his courses:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22david+snowden%22+%22master+class%22&;
btnG=Google+Search</RANT>

Snowden offers three fundamental facts that real organisational knowledge
managers need to accept:

1. We know more than we can say.

2. We can say more than we can write.

3. We don't know what we know until we need to know it.

Our own conclusions within Tenix is that there are three major areas of
concern for knowledge management solutions:

1. Culture (does the organization encourage people to capture, share and
manage its learning and knowledge, or is this lost when the people who did
the learning leave the organization?)

2. Process (are there established processes in the organization to capture
learning and make it readily available to others in the organization who
would benefit from the knowledge?)

3. Infrastructure (is their a suitable infrastructure in place to facilitate
culture and process?)

Of the three, culture is probably the most important consideration to get
right, and it is probably the least costly to implement in terms of dollar
cost. If the culture is right the organization will probably do quite well
even without world class processes and infrastructure.

As an example, many organizations are spending millions of dollars on
intranet technologies without having any clear understanding of why the need
the intranet and how to use it effectively because they haven't dealt with
their culture and process issues.

My bottom line answer to Rajeeva is that KM (in capital letters) probably is
a fad just like Business Process Reengineering. Snowden called BPR
first-generation KM. He also noted that it wasn't a complete failure,
because many organizations had genuinely bad practices which were
significantly improved by BPR processes. On the other hand,
second-generation KM based on huge Executive Information System
infrastructures and the like were complete failures because they totally
missed the point that most km (small letters) problems boiled down to
cultural and social issues and simple bad management that have nothing to do
with infrastructure. Based on my own experience, I totally agree.

On the other hand, because most of the knowledge in an engineering company
like Tenix is codified explicit knowledge (i.e., the stuff techwhirlers
write), and because in many areas we are still far from state-of-the art in
the way we manage and reuse this knowledge, we can derive great benefits
from extending our use of some kinds of technology. For example, in one
island of excellence we have already implemented the locally developed SIM
system (see my Technical Communication article -
http://www.tenix.com/PDFLibrary/91.pdf).

By the way, SIM is now being marketed in the US and Europe by a dedicated
division of SAIC as TeraText (see http://www.teratext.com). It provides both
portal and content management functions in the one engine. It isn't cheap,
but in our organization it has been highly cost effective, even on the
single site where it has been implemented to now.

However, to complete my answer to Rajeeva's question, many of today's
Knowledge Management vendors are missing the boat because they are trying to
sell systems targeting tacit knowledge issues which are best fixed with
cultural and social changes - not technology, and are completely missing
finding management solutions for the possibly much larger component of
codified, explicit knowledge. They are not seeking the explicit stuff we
write because their paradigm of knowledge is based on Michael Polanyi's
epistemology of Personal Knowledge published in the 1950's rather than Karl
Popper's Objective Knowledge, also published in the 1950's. For the full
story read my book or paper on the subject.

Regards

Bill Hall
Documentation Systems Analyst
Strategy and Development
Tenix Defence
Williamstown, Vic. 3016 Australia
http://www.tenix.com
mailto:bill -dot- hall -at- tenix -dot- com

------------------------------------------
Information is not knowledge
Knowledge is not wisdom
Wisdom is not truth
Truth is not beauty
Beauty is not love
Love is not music
Music is THE BEST
-----------------------------
(Zappa - Packard Goose)



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