It is about the concepts, not the name

I attended a faculty meeting at one of the places I teach at and was most surprised to learn that the entire MSc Knowledge Management course will be renamed to something along the lines of organisational development and learning organisation. Let me quote the head of department responsible for the course:

"Ever since I started in KM, it looked like the breakthrough of KM might just be 3 or 4 years away. Now this is a couple of years ago and it still looks like the breakthrough of KM is still 3 or 4 years away... We constantly have a lot of explaining to do for potential students as well as to industry partners as to what KM actually means and once we have explained this to them, we are fine, but this is a too big initial hurdle ... The contents of the course wont change substantially but the name will."

I think she has a good point there. The only industries I personally know of that not only "do KM", but also call it KM, are the legal and the pharmaceutical sector. This does not change the fact that a lot of organisations do stuff that most people would actually consider KM (provided they have heard the term). I had a look at the job titles of people I know who "do KM" and here is a selection of some titles/descriptions I found: Online Services Manager, Business Development Consultant, Information Manager, Research Manager, Special Counsel, Client Focus Manager, Strategy Analyst plus a high number of consultants, PSLs, librarians and academics who do research and/or consultancy in the field. Yet very few are actually called "Knowledge Manager", "Head of KM" or similar.

The trouble is, I kind of like the term KM and I still think that the term information management is too vulnerable to be hijacked by too technically oriented people. I have been ranting about this for a while now and I have not come to a useful conclusion, while the problem for those studying KM or looking to start a KM career remains the same: the jobs and the tasks are there, but it continues to be difficult to find them because they are called so many different names.

And for those of you who haven't heard about this yet: Microsoft is entering the KM arena. There are interesting comments on the subject by Tom Baldwin and Jack Vinson as well as a presentation on microsoft.com on how this will work. As far as I understand, this basically means a shared taxonomy across all MS applications and servers that can be full text searched and used to locate experts and connect people. There is not much to add to Tom Baldwin's final sentence in his posting: "I'm sure this tool will need a lot of work to truly help mine experience and expertise within a law firm, but it's good to see Microsoft enter the KM arena."
So, can we consider Microsoft boarding the KM train a breakthrough or not?

The not so formal KM job track

Jack Vinson shares his thoughts on whether there is a job track "for people studying knowledge management". His short answer is simple: "No." In his longer answer, Jack lists several options for KM professionals and goes on to say that

I heard a lot of discussion of boundary-spanning instruction and research. Similarly, I suspect that "real KM" jobs fit between the lines of formal hierarchies (...) makes them harder to find and describe in traditional corporate environments.

As I know from first hand experience, there are not too many jobs coming up when you enter "knowledge management" on any job search engine, but as Jack says, they are harder to find and to describe. Nevertheless I do know these jobs are there and I have done one for five years that was even formally called KM. My current job does not have the KM tag on it, but nevertheless means KM. Some are called by different names, some are embedded in departments you would at first sight not associate with KM, and some simply need to be shaped in order to become KM jobs.

Every organisation I know of has problems that KM offers the solution for. As Denham Gray says on his blog:

In common with others, we have key insights locked in e-mail threads, useful ppt presentations and Word docs hidden on multiple hard drives, process dos and don'ts that are not updated, useful heuristics that walk with staff turnover, business intelligence that is gathered but not sifted, collated or dispersed, vendor and customer feedback that gets lost or never relayed.

There are a lot of intersections with HR, strategy, IT and many more and some tools are simply too good not to aim for a quick and dirty solution that shows the benefits of KM and makes management ask for more. I believe blogs and social software can be such a quick and dirty solution to a lot of the problems large organisations face. And this is where KM comes in, as the base to provide meaningful solutions to common problems that - for some reason - have been around for a while but not yet tackled.

So, Jack is right, there is no formal career track. But there is a multitude of tracks you can pursue with KM and this makes the topic potentially more interesting. Maybe you dont even want to know what your exact job description or job title will be in five years time.

Yet another Google toy: Google Trends

Google Trends (found via Simon Jefferey) allows the user to recognise basic trends, such as this comparison of search volume and news reference on the words "blog" and "wiki":

On top of that you also get filtering options by country, region, language and time.

Some of the results seem strange, but then Google does warn below the graphs that the results are based upon "just a portion of our searches, and several approximations are used when computing your results". Or another nice way to put it is on their help pages: "We hope you find this service interesting and entertaining, but you probably don't want to write your PhD dissertation based on this information." Also do read Shel Holtz on the lack of blog related data in Google Trends.

Looking at the last few Google products, such as Maps, Scholar, Video, Web Alerts, Analytics, Mail, Personalised home page, etc. I am well hooked on what they have to offer. Continuing at this rate I give myself another year before there is nothing left I dont do with Google on the internet and even in my native language "to google something" is a normal phrase by now.

As an information professional, should I be worried about privacy or happy about the nice new tools?

The value of a man

I just finished reading a thesis I tutored on the subject of "Human Resource Accounting". The thesis itself is great, however my favourite human capital quote was missing:

The value or worth of a man is, as of all other things, his price; that is to say, so much as would be given for the use of his power, and therefore is not absolute, but a thing dependent on the need and judgement of another. An able conductor of soldiers is of great price in time of war present or imminent, but in peace not so. A learned and uncorrupt judge is much worth in time of peace, but not so much in war. And as in other things, so in men, not the seller, but the buyer determines the price. For let a man, as most men do, rate themselves at the highest value they can, yet their true value is no more than it is esteemed by others.

This quote is taken from Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes, the full text can be found online on the website of Oregon State University.

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.

Internal blogs: How not to start

I had a funny meeting with a software sales guy the other day. As he was sitting in the conference room, not at all worried about being the most casually dressed person in the room and the only one with a chewing gum, he explained his idea of a blog before I even had the chance to explain the reasons for wanting one.

10 minutes into the meeting, I finally realised what he was trying to sell: Some kind of content management system that required HTML knowledge and was also in most other aspects a thing of the past.

Another 10 minutes later I was most happy he was not trying to sell me MS Frontpage with single user licenses and HTML training courses for everyone from the receptionist to the CEO.

It seems that just like in the beginning of KM, when every basic DMS (like my favourite "KM tool" iManage) pretended to be a "holistic and visionary KM suite" inclusive of some of the most dubious ROI calculations, software companies are rebranding their most successless CMS products as blogging software. DONT BELIEVE THE HYPE. If you are looking for blog software, try finding someone who knows what social software is. My favourite leftover from the days of dot.com with his unbuttoned polo shirt pretended to have not understood me accustically when I asked about tagging. The only thing that kept me from getting angry with the guy was that I felt very sorry for him.