Evolving Paradigms in Knowledge Management

I came across this brief video on the Harvard Business Review the other day on how knowledge management is moving away from the repository as goal.

Here's the transcript of the video:
One of the interesting ways of capturing the problems with traditional knowledge management is it came at knowledge from a stocks viewpoint, a stocks of knowledge. The problem is, we have knowledge, it's distributed and dispersed throughout the organization. How do we capture it and make it available to others?

Certainly a big challenge, I don't want to diminish that as a value, but I think what people found as they tried to implement the various systems and methodologies to do that is there wasn't really a lot of motivation for people to invest the time and effort to develop and define those stocks and make them available as part of a broader repository.

This kind of approach really shifts the attention from stocks of knowledge, what we know today, to defining and developing new knowledge, addressing critical performance objectives that the company, the firm, has in front of it, so that you're driving and not by learning in the abstract, but because there is a real performance challenge in front of us; how do we identify the right people, bring them together, create the environments, and by the way; because of the digital platforms that we have now, as we create these environments, we are capturing, as a byproduct, the knowledge that's created as part of that environment. So, it becomes available to others but it is not the primary focus. It's a byproduct.

Back in the day when I was an MBA student studying knowledge management, one of the goals was a repository of knowledge. The major question was how does one capture what people in the organization know and make it available to others in the organization so all can benefit. So if I came across some fix for a persistent bug on company desktops, how can I share what I know so that Peter, Paul and Mary can benefit from my stroke of genius?

There are of course hurdles here - why would I (or any employee for that matter) spend their extra time in a KM system to document their knowledge - documentation is a drag (let's be honest) and if you're not accustomed to doing it then it seems like something that takes you out of your workflow.

I agree to some extent with this new paradigm of capturing knowledge as we collaborate with others on projects - this certain takes care of new knowledge created, as well as older undocumented knowledge that surfaces to help with this collaboration - however I still think that there is a valid reason of having a knowledge repository. Look at wikipedia - it IS a knowledge repository - we aren't necessarily developing new knowledge, we're just putting the pieces of the puzzle together. People still flock to it to GET information and there are people who go to it to GIVE information.  What motivates these people to GIVE?  This is what we need to look at in our organizations and foster such a giving environment.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Latour: Third Source of Uncertainty - Objects have agency too!

Image
Continuing on my exploration of ANT, and asynchronous and indirect dialogue with Latour - this blog post will cover the third source of uncertainty, which according to Latour, is that Objects have agency too! As with the previous blog posts, I've pulled out quotes from the book that seemed interesting, or that I reacted to in some way, and I am responding to them here. no tie can be said to be durable and made of social stuff (p. 66) This quote seems to continue Latour's assertion that there is no such thing as "social" or "social stuff" and that "social", or the meaning of needs to be negotiated and better understood.  It also continues the thought that social can only be seen from the actions of its actors, the traces they leave behind, and that these bonds are not durable because they need continuous reinforcement. I guess Social is a perishable item. Left to its own devices, a power relationship that mobilizes nothing but social skil...
Read more

MOOC participation - open door policy and analytics

The other day I was reading ZML Didaktik on the topic of MOOC participants. In MOOCs, one of the big questions is why are people lurking and not participating? If more than 500 people join a MOOC, why are only 10% contributing with any amount of regularity?  On the same blog, in a previous blog post, I had commented (it was an open stream of thought really) that perhaps there should be an open enrollment period, and then if the system sees that certain participants are bellow a threshold of activity, the system may give them the option to self-identify as a lurker, or un-register from the class. This line of thought went along a view that compared to the traditional classroom; in a traditional classroom students register for the course, they can attend classes for a week and then decide whether or not they want to stay with the course or not. If they do stay with the course they know that there is a certain amount of "lurking" that they can get away with, but they do have ...
Read more

You've been punk'd! However, that was an educational experience

Image
It's now the end of Teaching Goes Massive: New Skills Required (aka #massiveteaching) on coursera. Well, almost, we still have a couple of days left. I guess that the lesson here is that we were (the "learners") were punk'd† by Paul-Olivier Dehaye of the Univerisity of Zurich. After that last blog post (and subsequent pickup of the post by George Siemens and others) Inside Higher Education and the Chronicle wanted to chat with me about this MOOC experience. I only had time for one of the two before things went to press, so my 15 minutes of fame went to IHE.  Both IHE and the C hronicle have written about the topic, and have received some information from Coursera on the incident.  Others have also written about it (see here , here and here ) It's surprising to me that the University, and Coursera, waited until after this thing was a big issue in order to respond in the class, and clue people into what was happening. On Wednesday (day 3 of Week 3/3 of the ...
Read more