A dozen years after the debut of KM...

Many companies that jumped early onto the KM bandwagon have all but abandoned it, while many organizations that waited are now repeating the same mistakes of the pioneers.

This quote from Dave Pollard's blog is part of the introduction to a very interesting article on the current state and the future of KM. He basically argues that organisations have - for a variety of reasons - not yet harvested the full potential of KM and spent a lot of effort on automating existing information processes with little or no benefit, while the efficiency gains and the "democratization" of meaningful, context-rich information has not yet happened:

Democratizing corporate information entails the devolution of decision-making and other power to front-line workers, and executives are understandably nervous about this.

So, on one hand organisations need the efficiency gains that KM is able to provide, but at the same time this would make junior people more self sufficient and therefore capable and possibly eager for taking decisions earlier on in their careers. As Pollard writes, worries about such a situation are understandable and therefore need to be addressed along the lines of change management and strategy.

I had a question from a student last week asking if social software as such can be considered a way to "do KM" and my answer was in line with what Dave Pollard suggests. He reminds us that the number one tool to getting and sharing information is conversations and sees social networking applications as promising new tools for capturing social settings and conversations:

Adopting features and functionality of some of the more successful second-generation social networking tools like MySpace, FaceBook, Flickr, Del.icio.us, and Dodgeball, and cloning them onto applications that make it easier to identify, create, maintain and draw on valuable business relationships.

Internal blogs that allow a new starter to understand the environment, understand who knows what and who can help with specific questions. Intranets usually don't do that job.

Other interesting suggestions by Dave Pollard are simple one-click applications for connecting person-to-person, "auto-harvesting" of documents instead of relying on user submissions as well as stories to help the knowledge flow.

His outlook for the future of KM in large organisations is not very promising in terms of acceptance:

They will wait for pioneers to show them that the risks and costs of such programs are far outweighed by the benefits of better productivity, more engaged employees, greater innovation, and delighted customers. Until then, most large organizations' key information flows will continue to be focused on instructions, performance and compliance data, order-taking, promulgation of marketing material and other so-called customer relationship management data. For them, the promise of KM is still, alas, probably many years away.

I totally agree on this and I believe this is not necessarily bad. I think resistance to change and overcoming obstacles is a natural part of a job in KM and certainly among the things that make such a job more challenging, interesting, demanding and - once you have managed to get it done - more rewarding.

Click here for the full posting on Dave Pollard's blog.