I had another thought about structure and how it affects KM. In KM, there’s acknowledgment that employees — the knowledge holders — are not always so willing to share what they know because knowledge is valuable and can be used to increase status, power and even bargaining position with regard to position and compensation. Management, on the other hand, is keenly interested in separating what people know from the people who know it — makes it easier to wring value from the asset if you own it. Of course, that separation is now widely acknowledged as impossible. So the question is this: how does corporate structure interfere with or encourage resolving the conflict between employee knowledge and management desire to own and leverage it?

I think it has to come back to mechanistic versus organic organizational structures, but maybe this is too simple a dichotomy. What do you think?

-Carmen

I think that the first wave of KM, which was mostly IT and technology focused, was the product of mechanistic organizational structures. Now that more organic structures are needed for improved decision making in constantly changing business environments, KM can more readily evolve from its second-wave focus on explicit vs tacit knowledge capture to a third wave founded in the belief that knowledge is socially constructed and is therefore more readily exchanged and shared in conversation. Flat structures, in which individuals and frontline managers have more autonomy are, in sum, more suited to developing communities of practice and encouraging conversation than top-down hierarchical organizations.

-Carmen

+ “Knowledge Management: Begging for a Bigger Role” (Business Expert Press 2009) http://www.businessexpertpress.com/node/70)
+ “Corporate DNA” (Gower, 2006) http://www.gowerpub.com/TitleDetails.asp?sQueryISBN=0566086816&sPassString=Y&sKeyword1=Kransdorff&sKeyword2=&sBooleanSearch=AND&sSearchFrom=Author&sSubjectCode=999&sNewTitle=999&lStartPos=1)
+ Corporate Amnesia (Butterworth Heinemann 1998) http://www.corporate-amnesia.com)

This is not meant to be offensive, because I know the idea that a soft skill is anything but a hard skill can be hard to swallow for experts in that soft skill, but knowledge (not encyclopedic facts, maps or reels of film) is inherently social. Created by people. Shared among people. Lives in a people house.

Performing a root canal is not a people thing. It’s not something I could share with you or you or you. It’s not social… hence no citizen dentists… and hence no FindYourHighSchoolRootCanalBuddy.com social site.

…Knowledge itself can be specialized. But the way that knowledge is shared or by whom? Not so. It’s a social thing that dies in isolation. So why can’t the people who have the knowledge share it via social media? To me, social technologies seem like a happy compromise between the people with the knowledge and the CKOs who want to capture it and avoid organizational memory leak. No?

~joanna

So where are these communities of practice happening? At universities? In the government? What about in large public companies?–are such enterprises investing in techniques that better capture tacit knowledge?–do you happen to know of any that are, by chance? I’m curious. This subject really strikes a chord for me.

Thanks again for your comment….

~joanna

The take-away at the end, that to encourage communities of practice at organizations as the best way to develop KS, was very heartening. Not only would this enable conversations to occur, but it would also help take responsibility for KM out of the purview of IT, a place where Neil (and I) feel it doesn’t belong.

Even if it doesn’t seem to result in discrete knowledge objects I think any opportunity for discussion is productive, and successful organizations should build in time for employees to not only discuss work-related topics, but also to engage in social exchanges, and this can help build group cohesiveness.

Your observation that KM, regardless of what it’s been called, has been going on since the beginning, echoes what Neil MacAlpine said in his KM Cafe interview about KM in the future. So past and future — we share knowledge regardless of nomenclature.

At the cafe, we have been asking ourselves if KM is dead, and Neil’s input was that the name of KM doesn’t matter, that KM will continue despite what we call it, mostly because knowledge sharing is something we do naturally. His point is, however, that organizations can do a better job of supporting strategic knowledge sharing, which can result in better decisions, broader understanding and greater transfer of tacit knowledge. So there is a role for KM in organizations now and in the future.

He was also pretty adamant that the technology component of KM was the least that the field had to offer. I think there’s a spectrum of value that spans the technology itself to vibrant communities of practice and even to academia and complexity theory, where we are still trying to determine how best to support and encourage, rather than interfere with, a natural tendency to share.

-Carmen