The dream:
One of the central themes of KM is the design, building and maintenance of
an effective 'corporate memory', a repository, a dare I say it,
knowledge-base. Here the intellectual jewels of the organization will
reside, easily accessible, expertly indexed, intuitively browseable. Here
experts and novices will come for self- help knowledge, they will find the
correct solution quickly, be able to apply the solutions with confidence,
and learn from the 'collective experience of the organization'.
There is only one problem! this is real a dream. Many dollars have been
invested, many organizations have egg on their collective faces, many
repositories lie unused, shunned by novices and experts alike and yet
there are more KM projects starting each day with the same vision /
mission and another dream. Perhaps we think portals or automatic profiling
or collaborative systems will do this time!
Where did we go wrong?
Knowledge vs. information:
We failed to clearly appreciate and understand that we were storing
information, that context is key, content without community is not king,
feedback, critique, continual validation and annotation is everything,
information has a social side, knowledge flows via relationships not via
access to static information.
Shared space:
We did not design for dialog, we built a vault to secure objects, when we
badly needed a place to support relationships. We indexed, clustered and
classified the content, when we really needed to point to people, we
imposed order when we should have co-designed and shared the meaning, we
had workflow and access rights, when we needed evangelism and interaction.
A hollow collection:
We discovered.
1) Collecting information, even elicitation of rules and heuristics,
[if we even thought that far], is the easy part, getting people to
trust & use the 'strange' knowledge is the major concern.
2) Knowledge emerges over time, it requires an environment of trust,
a shared language, a familiarity, strong validation from colleagues
and lives in a community not in static text.
3) Knowledge to be used, requires understanding of context,
implications, limitations and continual testing. Knowledge is
fragile, it lives in the stories & spaces between individuals and
communities, not in a database or entirely in a set of rules or
collection of examples, or in policies or processes.
4) Knowledge changes, what you elicit the first time is likely to
alter as individuals and groups validate, connect and use it, we were
not prepared for unending cycles, we did not focus on reciprocity and
feedback.
5) You will not get real quality knowledge without trust, strong
critique, deep dialog, open communications. If you do not elicit with
an appreciation of maintaining the identity of the group / individual,
you will only get shallow stuff.
6) Knowledge comes in many forms, we did not decide carefully what
type of knowledge we wanted (knowledge of customers, of procedures,
of policies, of strategy, of competitors, knowledge of best
practices, knowledge from failures (the hardest to get, the most
valuable?), knowledge of people - relationships, tips, tricks, short
cuts, 'good' solutions, heuristics......)
7) The best elicitation is driven by quality questions, to get to the
really good stuff, you need to have strong relationships and almost
equally deep domain understanding, otherwise the gems get lost. We
thought this was a library (organizing and catalog) function.
8) Knowledge acquisition is NOT extracting concepts from documents,
clustering objects, mining transactions. No system or tool can do it
for you! we fell into the knowledge 'harvesting' trap along with
others:
http://www.ingenuity.com/knowledgeacquisition.html
http://www.knowledgeharvesting.com/process.htm
http://www.intelligentkm.com/feature/feat1.shtml
http://www.learnerfirst.com/contentproducts-KH.html
Have we learned anything yet????
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