5 key KM concepts
Reflecting on the top 5 KM concepts, which would you choose?
Tacit Knowledge
Understanding the nature, role, importance and value of tacit knowledge, at an individual and group level, is key to formulating KM strategy, deciding on cultural change, picking appropriate tools and finding a suitable measurement system. Without awareness of tacit knowledge any KM program is unlikely to maintain perspective and balance. Here is a link to explore further:
Corporate memory
The justification for building an organizational or group memory comes from "if we only knew what we already know". There is huge leverage and competitive advantage to be had from capturing insights, recording proven solutions, preventing re-invention of the wheel, learning from errors and sharing experience. Intuitive navigation, individual tags, facile annotation and links to experts are the key affordances here.
Expertise directory
Connecting people, finding experts and facilitation of dialog are the core ingredients of any KM program. Yellowpages, skills databases, interest or learning profiles, personal blogs and RSS feeds are some approaches to this issue. Finding ways to keep profiles current and incentives to drive the system are thorny issues. Many current systems do not articulate the availability or interest parameters essential to selecting & approaching colleagues.
Ontologies
Sharing and developing a common language is perhaps the critical knowledge management practice. Describing categories, making distinctions, assigning names, sharing meaning, concepts and experiences, promoting understanding and making sense of the 'world' are fundamental to community inquiry, collaboration, learning, awareness and innovation. Any KM effort needs to devote time and resources to building a lingua franca - shared language
Personal Knowledge Management (PKM)
There is a deep chasm within KM between personal and social approaches. PKM is concerned with individual responsibility for learning, connecting, creating, sharing and organizing ideas, thoughts, insights, beliefs and assumptions. Recently technologies to publish on the Internet (blogs) and networking engines have focused attention on individual competencies and practices.
Other contenders?
Intellectual capital, organizational learning, data mining, knowledge harvesting, knowledge mapping
very informative and thought provoking. but need to be mre convincing at some parts
Posted by: gokul b alex | June 18, 2005 at 05:52 AM
Corporate Memory - It seems like most things this is a sliding scale from None to little. I am not sure if Corporate Memory is something to work on explicitly or whether it is a measurement of the success of other things.
Posted by: Scott Sorley | April 18, 2005 at 12:21 AM
Based on past corporate experience, if I could select onle ONE thing, I would select corporate memory. So much information "leaves" or is forgotten. A way of keeping that memory for the future can be critically important. Not only why did we do X, but why didn't we do X.
Posted by: Jill Hurst-Wahl | January 29, 2005 at 03:03 PM
Der Mr. Denham,
Hello,i'm new to KM, and i like your writing about KM, you ask which is most important, I think maybe tacit knowledge. Butas I am knew could you explain more about your thoughts on which concepts are most important.
Posted by: trisundari | January 23, 2005 at 11:29 PM
The one I would select is PKM, Thats because I believe Personal KM is the key foundation upon which all the rest of KM builds. I believe that PKM may be positioned as not social enough, I agree only in terms of the label which may imply a relatively unsocial side. However I do feel that it is PKM, ensuring that each person is empowered with their own personal view on the world, their own "soapbox", as well as their personally centered filters and explicit relationship builders, that provides the necessary independent diversity of opinion for any community knowledge to grow upon .
For me PKM may be best manifested by a souped up blog site, what I''d like to imagine will eventually become a full online "Virtual Persona" (when we arent dircetly present for real time interaction). An online proxy for us, as Dave Pollard said somewhere. A virtual persona would do what a blog site does for us, but in addition becomes the full communication center for us handling all messaging in variety formats for whatever the appropriate situation and presence requirements desired by us. It would establish our persona that we want to present to the world in increasing layers of emotional gradient, like peeling an onion layer by layer to reveal the appropriate background and interactivity based on permissions we set. It would be our information filter, our information organizer, our messaging center, our multifacted proxy to the world, our outward bound communications gateway, our social relationship manager.
PKM should be about managing our Content, Collaboration, Communication and Social needs. I cannot imagine how we can divorce PKM from the social aspects. But if the name PKM raises doubt then maybe we should be talking P(S)KM. I do believe PKM''s value is only fully realized in context of a community of PKM''ers, so in a sense its really a P & social KM concept, the personal KM cannot be divorced form the Social side of things. In a sense this is languages flaw in forcing us to divide concepts by the very fact we have to create reductionistic labels to express things to each other.
Such a PKM would be the basis for very social and connected knowledge reflection sharing and dialogue. It would be through the strength of such a PKM that group, community and organizational KM flourishes more liberally. Though a Virtual Persona tool doesnt exist today, I see blogs and the blogosphere as the best early forerunner, having many of the valuable elements we need to improve our PKM.
P(S)KM in its community setting provides rich data to build realistic expertise directories automatically
P(S)KM in its collective dialogues and socially driven categorization of concepts/data can potentially provide more relevant and meaningful ontologies or at least the basis for them.
P(S)KM through the format of rich constructive online dialogues, with room for individual expression and differences, but with a collective discussion atop it is one of the best ways to nurture recordable tacit knowledge
P(S)KM is the best way to generate the recorded knowledge sharing which has to be a fundamental basis on which any real and relevant Corporate Memeory can be created.
P(S)KM is about growing the intangible that Knowledge really is both within the mind of a personal knower, and between the community of knowers that make up an organization. Intellectual capital on the other hand is a term that starts off on the wrong foot by making people and knowledge seem like objects, encouraging us to imagine we can round up and measure assets, when we should be thinking more of knowledge as a process, instead of information records - which are just poor shadows of knowledge and meaning.
P(S)KM is about creating an organization full of people learning and growing their insight. Data mining is just an analysis tool. Data mining lives or dies by the people wielding it, if they understand and have the insights to ask good questions from the data and to make correct inferences from data mining results, and even more so to then understand the implications for their business.
Essentially I see P(S)KM as the basis that raises the effectiveness of all the other KM concepts you mentioned. Not that they are not important, just that with attention to P(S)KM first the rest will come more easily or have better results
There was one I almost excepted, Organizational Learning. But once again, I see effective continuous organizational learning as an end we want to achieve while P(S)KM is the means to achieve it.
More than anything I would choose PKM form that list because to me it represents the New generation approach to KM. For me the concept of PKM jettisons a lot that was wrong with KM before. Namely the top down enterprise initiative driven approach to KM. PKM offers us the chance to empower the people and increase the flow of knowledge in organizations. It offers us the chance for people to "BE" the change, rather than to be the objects of change management initiatives.
To finish, I would like to rephrase this question slightly. If your organization''s success depended upon your choice and you could choose only 1 KM concept from all the above and only one tool to support it, to enhance your KM, what would it be?
I dont think the choice is so hard to make today, and in that sense KM has really turned a corner.
Posted by: Mark Ranford | January 16, 2005 at 07:02 AM