Making Sense of Knowledge Management
This article is three years old, but it’s still quite good because it captures and attempts to solve an important truth: knowledge management is tricky to define. And the lack of definition is a big reason why it doesn’t gel in people’s minds.
Making Knowledge Management Work on your Intranet
[…] what really is knowledge management? Is it simply the cataloging of all the documentation that resides on server hard drives, Outlook inboxes, and the filing cabinets of employees?
The author frames knowledge management against Communities of Practice, which I agree with. He includes a great definition of a CoP, taken from McKinsey:
[…] groups of people who are informally bound to one another by exposure to a common class of problems. These groups share their learnings and knowledge resources continuously and informally [among] each other for mutual benefit.
(It’s worth mentioning that, under this definition, a CoP really becomes a social network, which is the hot intranet buzzword these days. But that’s another conversation entirely…)
The article goes on to present some worthwhile advice about starting a KM project and provides a sample KM scenario.
However, what I think people struggle with sometimes in KM projects is what to publish. If we distill KM down to individual pieces of content, what do they look like? What is the smallest conceptual unit of content in a KM project? An article? A wiki page? A forum post?
Look at it from the perspective of the employee in the thick of it. How does Bob the Salesman know what to share? Say he has an tip about how to better format a sales proposal. What does he do with this? Does he make a forum post? Does he write an article? Does he post it on a personal blog? Does he write a procedure or a policy?
In short, how does he get this opinion out of his head and into a format from which it can provide some value?
Understand that this isn’t an inconsequential question. There’s a “dance floor syndrome” with publishing content to an intranet, in full view of all your peers – no one wants to be the first guy on the dance floor. This is doubly true when no one has defined the format and context of what content should be published. The Enterprise 2.0 landscape is littered with wikis still waiting for that first article.
In these situations it would probably help to clearly define different formats for conceptual topics. If you have a “Tip” format with nothing but a title and a block of text, perhaps Bob then thinks “Yeah, it’s a ‘tip.' I can write down a ‘tip’ – that’s no big deal.”
And there’s one baby step down the KM road.