Cross-posted to the FASTForward blog.
The changes to what we call knowledge work have been coming thick and fast for at least a decade now.
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
Knowledge management (KM) sometimes seems like the business buzzword that won’t go away. But that may be changing. As Web 2.0 / E2.0 / Social business penetrates and spreads through workplaces, has it rendered KM as it was once known obsolete … or not ?
We have all been wrestling with the massive changes brought onto the scene by hyperlinks, collaborative platforms and social computing technology and capabilities.
These are changes that portend transforming the relationship between information technology, the nature of knowledge work, how organizations are structured and how humans operate when surrounded and penetrated by ongoing flows of information. It’s doubly important to note and understand that we are in reality still only in the early days of these fundamental changes to both work processes and the capabilities of the electronic infrastructure of hardware and software that are now ensconced in the digital workplace.
A first wave of what we currently call knowledge management (KM) appeared in the mid-to-late 1990’s as organizations began coming to grips with the potent combined forces of information technology and its twin sister, information-based knowledge work. Much of the attention and effort centred on integrated information systems and specialized information technology that combined enabled the categorization, archiving and easy access to documents and other codified knowledge.
Debates raged about the best ways to move back and forth between the codified ‘explicit’ knowledge and the less obvious, often invisible ‘tacit’ knowledge that surfaces in human interaction, and how best to enable or enhance the collaborative and interactive use of information and knowledge to get things done or create additional useful knowledge.
Much water has passed under many bridges over the past five years or so. Blogs and wikis began to appear on the scene in 2001 and 2002 and some speculated then that these tools – or more accurately their derivatives – would create a major impact on the knowledge workplace. They were followed by the evolution and expansion of what has come to be known as Web 2.0 … features, functions and web services enabled by plug-ins, widgets and other easy-to-use digital mechanisms.
It was not until the middle of 2006 that IT executives and managers began to realize that lightweight, easy-to-use-and-integrate capabilities for finding information, pulling it apart and putting it together again in different ways, and then building useful knowledge would probably transform key areas of knowledge work and its attendant dynamics.
Today there is rapidly growing awareness that the Web will play a major, if not dominant, role in the use of information technology by organizations small and large, whether through upgrading to the latest versions of major ERP systems that incorporate social software and collaboration capabilities and a range of useful widgets and plug-ins, or through wider adoption of SaaS etc. Underway are many make-overs of an enterprise’s work systems to incorporate collaborative platforms and capabilities. Increasingly, changes to functionality, systems integration and IT architecture will need to be built around both individual and group cognitive and interactive styles and needs as well as the enterprise’s business process requirements
Many interviews with some of the acknowledged experts in the domain of knowledge management and in technology companies have led to forecasts of some version of the points outlined below (and of course many variations on the theme that each point suggests):
- KM assumed that knowledge work in information-based organizations basically remains more or less the same … more static or stable as opposed to dynamic (and always under construction) with ongoing reference to core dependencies on knowledge objects. In other words traditional KM was over-reliant on structure where structure when working with flows of information is difficult to impose and fix into place
- “how to create a knowledge sharing culture?,” is not the right question. It’s more important to ask and understand “what you can do to encourage and facilitate connections?”, supplemented with tools, capabilities and socially-generated context, to help the appropriate information and knowledge be available when and where it is most needed and best used. This means that a much-needed role and focus is as a catalyst and facilitator of connections, helping others see why it is now this way and how things work.
- Knowledge transfer is self-assembling and self-organizing. It really can’t be otherwise … it is done by humans in interaction.
- By and large, incentives should no be used to stimulate contributions of information. Generally, this leads to gaming by those that are better at managing than at creating/innovating
- Had today’s Web 2.0 tools and capabilities had been available a decade ago, what we have called knowledge management would have been embraced and used more successfully.
- Considering or planning a “knowledge audit” implies auditing static “physical” knowledge assets. The knowledge accessed and used in organizations is better thought of as a dependency relationship of business / organizational processes on knowledge objects which underpin the social construction of just-in-time knowledge from ongoing flows of dynamic information.
- We need to think more carefully about combining top-down design and direction of business processes with the bottom-up use of knowledge objects. The combination of structure and organic generation and synthesis can help manage effectively in continuous flows of incoming and outgoing information (knowledge objects are anything that we cancoherently manage).
- An appropriate amount of structure (design constraints) is necessary to enable consistent recall and findability of information.
- Computers alone cannot competently tag content. Authors must tag the content they create and / or use. Putting names and labels to content is essential and often may be words that do not appear in the content (this is the essence of metadata).
- Centralized IT control is on its way out. Much more of the decision-making about what platforms / applications / software to be used will be made in by line management or by project teams. Security concerns are real due to Web 2.0 but not apocalyptic and should focus on protecting corporate data, not in regimenting the means of collaboration.
- Human Resources (HR) will in all likelihood need to undergo a massive transformation. The nature and design of knowledge work keeps changing and as that change accelerates, it’s likely that companies will need to move towards the self-organizing of work … including people, tools and methods.
Exploration of the issues in the field of Enterprise 2.0 has also more recently led to the understanding that social computing depends to some degree on the architecture, engineering and specialized knowledge handling technology that has come before. Numerous vendors with KM-labelled products (mostly leveraging intranets) appeared in the market in the late 1990s and early 2000’s. During that same period, hundreds of major enterprises developed and implemented KM programmes and / or functionality, to some degree or other.
Social computing in the enterprise is intended to improve the collaboration, use of information and knowledge and the decision-making effectiveness of individuals, teams or the whole enterprise. Today, more and more of the established KM-oriented products have added social-computing functionality. Existing capabilities and implementations are being adapted, re-designed and/or added to by Web 2.0 applications, platforms and capabilities that make it easier and faster for knowledge workers to exchange information, collaborate and build and use.
While through the spread of social computing KM may be coming out of an initial identity crisis, the advent and rapid spread of what is termed Enterprise 2.0 has helped create for KM a new Identity Crisis 2.0. Today it seems clear that the new crop of collaboration tools, platforms and methods for enhanced collaboration are rapidly synthesizing and integrating fragmented or separate components of what was understood to be a KM-oriented system a few short years ago.
And whatever the current guise (which is likely to be different in virtually every organization) increasingly practicality and ease-of-use will rule the day.
D’oh !
Laisser un commentaire