One of last night's questions was about the relationship between KM and general management. A related question had to do with whether we would be looking at KM issues in the context of specific functional areas.

While I think you can make a cogent argument that knowledge management will become equivalent to general management in knowledge intensive organizations, that still leaves us with the task of defining knowledge management. In other words, I suspect that knowledge management skills will become the core components of general management work, but today's general managers don't think of their jobs that way and offer few lessons for KM. We're still left with the task of figuring out some useful things to say about KM itself.

A useful starting point is to think about what lenses we can use to examine KM issues.

The first is to examine what KM means in the context of our own status as knowledge workers. If we are expected to create new knowledge, or better apply existing knowledge, or do a better job of sharing knowledge; what new skills and practices does that demand from us? It's too tempting and too easy to fall into the trap of thinking about KM as another one of those topics that affects somebody else in the organization, but I don't need to change. To borrow from the late Walt Kelly, "we have met the enemy, and he is us." I believe this is a fertile and, largely, unexplored dimension of the KM problem.

Second, I'm skeptical about how much KM insight is likely to come from diving into specific functional areas. While the knowledge problems of operations will have a different distribution than those in marketing, I'm not sure how helpful that will be.

Third, there will be value in asking what general actions an organization can take to increase the value it realizes from knowledge. That may equate to the question of what is the value of putting someone in charge of KM, but that may not be the most productive line of attack.

Huh?

There will be KM issues that are better addressed at the organizational level than the individual knowledge worker level. Suppose, for example, that you concluded that it would be desirable to reduce an organization's use of email in favor of more KM friendly tools like threaded discussion (or weblogs for that matter). As an individual knowledge worker, you might come to that conclusion, but would make little progress organizaitonally implementing that decision for yourself. Someone needs to help the organization come to that conclusion and develop a plan for leading the way.

That does not, however, imply that a permanent position, or a temporary one, of chief knowledge officer is the right way to get there. Once you get certain new behaviors baked into the culture and processes of the organization, you're done. You want to disband the group that made it happen and move on to the next issue. That could be hard to do if you've created an organizational entity that will now be looking to increase its budgets and defend its existence.

Two lenses of primary value. One is the perspective of individual knowledge worker. What is worth doing at that level to get better payoff from knowledge work practices. The second is a loosely defined organizational level. What problems/opportunities transcend the scope of an individual knowledge worker and benefit from taking a broader perspective. We'll be looking at both.

9:21:52 PM •  • comment