Anywhere - Anytime knowledge??

Many organizations have pinned their hopes on delivery of knowledge anywhere, anytime, just-in-time.

Time to share some thoughts:

In many ways, this latent desire parallels the technology vs. people schism in KM. Almost all the talk and writings are about technology choices, possibilities and needs - there is little sustained discussion around the social aspects, the connections, relationships, trust, identity issues that must be in-place for any meaningful knowledge exchange and sharing.

Most anywhere, anytime knowledge concepts tend to regard knowledge as an object, relatively static, possible to represent in digital formats, self-contained, easy to characterize and classify. These are properties of information rather than knowledge, they tend to gloss over issues of audience, context, shared understanding, trust, history & background, common language, mental models, value sets and worldviews.

JIT knowledge is possible, but it requires additional layers to be enabled.

If we have a shared space, have formed a relationship, built trust, made distinctions, crafted a pattern language together and are comfortable 'being' rather than just 'knowing', there is a foundation for exchanging, creating, sharing, validating and improving knowledge, then conditions for listening, becoming aware, engaging in deep dialog and trusting the shared content can be established.

The lofty goal of tossing knowledge nuggets over the proverbial cubicle wall is clearly far slower, far more social and less-certain, than ensuring technology driven access, enabling instant repository search or wrapping content in meta-data, would suggest.

Here is a link to 'the social life of knowledge' that takes an EU look at these very issues.

In my experience, anywhere / anytime / self-access knowledge qualifies as a myth, hoax or software selling ruse.

Comments

[Mark]

"tend to regard knowledge as an object"
The corollary is that information and knowledge are identical, and that providing knowledge(information) is sufficient to create the behavior you want. To me this seems like something built into our educational system, at least at the K-12 levels.

[David Locke]

When IT systems start talking anytime, anywhere, then KM people start talking the same way. Never mind that data and information are explicit. Knowledge might be explicit, but most of it isn't explicit. The only knowledge that can be anytime, anywhere is explicit knowledge.

This is another example of IT and training people getting into KM by skewing the definition of knowledge. This situation gets old fast.