Knowledge-at-work

Knowledge as ecology

Reflecting on many years working, thinking and writing on KM, the strongest meme for me remains knowledge ecology. Looking at knowledge as an ecology evokes powerful images, similarities and useful connections. Let's explore:

Knowledge evolves.

Today's knowledge may not be useful, applicable or recognised tomorrow. This is why it is so difficult to reconstruct past civilizations - we can find artifacts, restore buildings, speculate on social norms but we cannot retrace, thought forms, social norms, unwritten categories. Knowledge is 'local', social and always morphing. We build on yesterdays experience and explore to discover tomorrows 'truths'.

Relationships matter.

You cannot appreciate, picture, evaluate or quantify knowledge without understanding how things are connected, without a feel for the paths along which knowledge flows, without a 'picture' of trust, reciprocity, social capital and people to people relationships. Stocks alone do not tell the story, with data on patents or other IP you cannot determine the potential for future innovation, predict the impact of retirements or the disruption of a merger.

Emergence & self-organisation.

Knowledge emerges through conversation, it is hard to codify, capture and store unless there is a community that resurfaces, refines and creates distinctions, giving meaning, testing and weeding beliefs and thoughts. There is an autopoietic  relationship between knower and the environment, each influencing the other.

Think.
Sustainability, adaptation, food and energy webs & chains, stasis, climax, niche, fitness,

Nardi & Day examine information ecologies in terms of co-evolution, keystone species, diversity and system flows. They convey many of the key tenets of knowledge ecology. John Seely Brown also addresses this subject noting the importance of sense-making and community.

Check this collection of resources on knowledge ecology for further reading, and my previous post on this topic.

 

 

KM failing?

In an endless quest to discover our KM roots, articulate or bound a clear KM domain, and agree on basic postulates, we seem to be as scattered and divided as ever, in danger of falling off the corporate map and being absorbed by other fads.

Kaye Vivian has asked a number of interesting questions in her Dove Lane blog that explore this very area and asks if we:

• have been hijacked by vendors? - for a while but they have dropped us now
• are missing the bigger picture? - not sure, KM is a dynamic & emergent domain
• lack metrics? - do not believe this is a key issue
• confuse our audience? - agree, we cannot even gather a wikipedia entry that explains what or whom we are

Is this a bad thing?

Do not think so.

KM meta-talk helps to keep the conversation alive. True we have lost conference attendance, KM articles no longer get published in HBR, Business2.0, Information Week, Wired or MIT Sloan Management Review at the rate we saw in 1994-2002, Internet KM forums have dwindled, new Km books are far and few between, academic courses have changed title and Act-KM is the only worthwhile listserve.

Our conversations are now distributed, diverse and fragmented. KM Bloggers are helping to keep the flame alive, while KM practices appear in learning2.0, library 2.0 and related themes. Social software applications now replace large monolithic software as the way to go. Back-channel dialog (via Skype, IM and e-mail) substitutes for cozy on-line discussions,  and key issues have shifted from yellowpages and corporate memory to social networks and RSS feeds.

KM may be fading from the corporate radar, but the key propositions, the value and paradigmatic advances remain strong, important and resurface as P2P networking, virtual teams, enterprise networks, innovation theory, informal learning ......

The nature of knowledge (again)

Without an understanding of knowledge, most of what we do in KM becomes rather pointless.

Now I know many grow tired of this endless circle without a definitive answer, but it is key that we keep the dialog open, listen with care, approach the beast from yet another angle and revisit our own bias, beliefs, judgements and conclusions.

Recent dialog at Act-km has me (re)thinking my own models and collecting the questions we all need to ask ourselves and others in this area. Excellent commentary from Bill Hall, Joe Firestone, John Maloney and Dave Snowden........

So what exactly is the nature of this beast? Here are some things to think about:

Knowledge about knowledge

If you have any questions or thoughts please share.

KM wikipedia regression

Since December the KM entry at wikipedia has taken a turn for the worse. This is unfortunate and as folk interested in the domain, it puts us to shame. So I have started to rewite some of the sections and would like to appeal to you to lend a hand.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_management

I'm suggesting we have these sections

• Overview
• History
• The KM domain
• Core theory
• KM competencies
• References
• External links
• KM bloggers

Where possible we should have separate linked pages within Wikipedia for sub-themes, e.g. intellectual capital, knowledge assets, KM generations or key conepts, e.g. tacit knowledge, knowledge mapping.

The aim should be to showcase the depth, importance, applicability and value of KM, include pointers to key content, people and provide a quick entry point to our domain knowledge.

The S2 industry - circles with more than 360 degrees?

Structured settlements is an interesting vertical industry to explore the influence of legal changes, the role of the Internet and just how public policy issues come into play.

To transfer or not to transfer

Adam Scales has written a key paper in this area and questions one of the underlying tenets of NSSTA members selling annuities- that structured settlement recipients cannot look after their money and need to be protected from wealth dissipation. He points to a lack of evidence for this view and says that a few cases do not constitute a pattern nor a trend.

John Darer takes the opposite view and repeatedly calls upon factoring (transfer) companies to do away with misleading advertisements in his blog.

A settlement life-cycle

Scales points to an interesting quirk of legal wrangling. A traditional lump-sum settlement may be turned into a tax free structured settlement, which can then (subject to State Structured Settlement Protection Acts) be converted into a tax free lump sum payment. Along the way Insurance defendants may require that only registered brokers can handle the deal, assign payment responsibilities to a third party and remove liabilities from their balance sheets, factoring companies can then entice recipients, offer deep discounts, bundle their purchased AAA rated securities and resell these asset securitization packages for a profit.

Have been collecting S2 links on this S2-future wiki.

It all seems a little strange and unreal!!