KM 3.0 Part I: What is KM ?

Overview

What is knowledge:
"Expertise acquired by a person through experience or education"

Data is symbols, information is processed data (who, what, where, when) while knowledge is expertise that answers "how" questions. You may also use wisdom to answer the "why".

What is knowledge management (KM):
"A range of practices used in an organization to collect and share knowledge to help people get their job done"

It is not merely a collection of data or information, but rather a collection of knowledge and wisdom that can be useful to others (knowledge has no intrinsic value of its own - it is only valuable when it is used).

Knowledge management 1-2-3

Many modern businesses have less focus on the traditional three factors of production - land, labor and capital, and more focus on the "new" fourth factor: knowledge.

Knowledge is increasingly becoming the differentiating competitive factor, and managing knowledge has therefore become increasingly more important.

KM 1.0 focused on collecting knowledge "before it walked out the door".

Many organizations created large knowledge systems, expert systems, knowledge repositories and intranets to ensure that they captured their knowledge assets.

Most companies didn't really have a clear strategy for using this knowledge, but at least they made sure that they collected it and kept it in a database or file somewhere.

KM 2.0 focused on sharing knowledge using web-enabled and social media tools.

With the advent of web 2.0, focus shifted towards sharing, communication and collaboration. The popularity of social media and web 2.0 tools has started to reach the enterprise, and the use of these tools in an enterprise setting is often named "Enterprise 2.0".

Instead of simply capturing knowledge, KM 2.0 focuses on sharing knowledge directly between people using new social media tools like blogs,wikis, Twitter and IMs.

KM 3.0 focus on using existing knowledge to help people get their job done !

At the core this simply means having access to useful knowledge when you need it.

This may mean getting a document from a central database, getting a phone number from a co-worker, getting a checklist for launching a marketing campaign or getting meeting notes from a project meeting.

With the increasing popularity of web 2.0 and new social media tools a new term was introduced: "Information overload".

It refers to an excessive amount of information available, making it more difficult to separate the useful information from the noise.

We are quickly reaching the point where we don't need to collect and share more information, but rather better information (and often less to reduce information overload). Having access to 10 relevant quality documents is much better than having 1,000 irrelevant useless documents.

Therefore, KM 3.0 is about having knowledge we can use rather than collecting and sharing as much as possible.

The real purpose of KM

What is the real purpose of knowledge management?
"Helping people get their job done !"

It is not about "keeping the knowledge" as most of the knowledge is not possible to write down anyway.

We may capture explicit knowledge (knowledge that can be structured and documented) but we can't capture the tacit knowledge (knowledge that is linked to human senses and experience). In many cases the explicit knowledge is also useless without the proper amount of experience (tacit knowledge).

If you can't keep your people in your organization, you will not keep their (most important) knowledge either !

So, how do you help people get their job done ? Well, you need to know what their job is, and how they should do it. Then you need to figure out what they need to get their job done.

For common tasks and processes you can analyze this top-down. For specialized tasks and processes, you need to analyze this bottom-up at a local level where the expertise is. For knowledge workers, the ones that knows "the what, the how and the needs" best are themselves. In some jobs, simple checklists for common operations may be good enough. In other jobs, large repositories of various knowledge may be needed.

"For, once beyond the apprentice stage, knowledge workers must know more about their job than their boss does - or else they are no good at all. In fact, that they know more about their job than anybody else in the organization is part of the definition of knowledge workers"
- Peter Drucker

As each job becomes more specialized, the usefulness of sharing knowledge decreases. However, this does not mean that knowledge sharing is useless, but unnecessary knowledge collection and sharing will only lead to increased information overload and decreased productivity, not increased productivity.

Collecting knowledge must be de-centralized, and sharing knowledge must be more focused. Each knowledge worker is an island - there is less common knowledge and more specialized knowledge. Each knowledge worker must collect more for themselves, and less for others. Each knowledge worker is also responsible for reducing the noise and the information overload by focusing more on sharing quality than quantity.

Collecting and sharing with others is still important, but what you share with your project is not necessary the same as you share with your department, division or your organization.

- There is no point collecting common knowledge if it isn't shared.
- There is no point sharing knowledge if it isn't used.

Part II: The value of knowledge