The Chief Knowledge Officer’s Dilemma
Let’s face it: The whole “Knowledge Management” experiment was a failure.
Wikipediea defines Knowledge Management this way:
“an approach to improving organizational outcomes and organizational learning by introducing into an organization a range of specific processes and practices for identifying and capturing knowledge, know-how, expertise and other intellectual capital, and for making such knowledge assets available for transfer and reuse across the organization.”
I have no idea what that means.
But I do know that knowledge management focuses on the symptoms, and not on solving the root cause.
IBM’s Michael A. Fontaine and Eric Lesser point to a “failure to understand and connect knowledge management into individuals’ daily work activities.“.
Martin Roell puts it much more bluntly:
KM has been taken an industrial perspective, focussing on organizational goals, ignoring the needs of the individual knowledge worker:
“The fatal flaw in thinking in terms of knowledge management is in adopting the perspective of the organization as the relevant beneficiary. Discussions of knowledge management start from the premise that the organization is not realizing full value from the knowledge of its employees. While likely true, this fails to address the much more important question from a knowledge worker’s perspective of ‘what’s in it for me?’.” (McGee, 2003)
Martin goes on to say:
Traditional knowledge management has failed to address the problem of knowledge worker productivity. Tools that have been developed in KM focused on information management and do not support many of the key knowledge work processes.1
A Change in the Chief Knowledge Office’s Goals and Objectives
The advent of blogs, wikis, social bookmarking tools and social filtering tools like Digg, mean that the CKO’s job has totally changed.
Wikipedia hasn’t even caught up. Here’s what Wikipedia says about the CKO:
CKOs can help an organization maximize the returns on investment in knowledge (people, processes and intellectual capital), exploit their intangible assets (know-how, patents, customer relationships), repeat successes, share best practices, improve innovation, and avoid knowledge loss after organizational restructuring.
CKO responsibilities include such things as (1) developing an overall framework that guides knowledge management, (2) actively promoting the knowledge agenda within and beyond the company, (3) overseeing the development of the knowledge infrastructure, and (4) facilitating connections, coordination and communications.
In other words, the old definition of a CKO’s job was to guide knowledge management.
The new definition: the CKO’s job is to empower knowledge workers. That means giving knowledge workers tools that make them more productive. That means helping knowledge workers to communicate more effectively.
Today, knowledge workers write once, and cut & paste often.
In the not too distant future, in the Enterprise 2.0 world, knowledge workers will write once, link often, search even more and truly start to leverage their collective knowledge. But, they will do it as a part of their regular work flow; not as separate add-on task that only slows them down.
If you are interested in specific examples, check out:
So What is the Chief Knowledge Office’s Dilemma?
Chief Knowledge Officers today, actually have several dilemmas:
Today’s “knowledge management” technology is all wrong.
It might do content management, but it doesn’t do knowledge worker empowerment.
Pointing to existing enterprise technology and saying “But it let’s us create a web page” or “It let’s us create a portal page” is a little like saying “I have a Walkman that plays tape cassettes, why would I need an iPod?”
Even when compared with earlier generations of portable digital music players, the iPod is something special. It’s ease of use and appealing design are all part of it’s success.
The failure of knowledge management is a failure to elicit participation. End users simply do not and will not use clumsy, ugly, difficult and unsatisfying knowledge management tools.
Some of the Web 2.0 players, on the other hand, have proven in the wilds of the open Internet that they have figured out the secret sauce. Without the need for participation and buy-in from senior managers, tens of millions of people have created personal blogs.
If you want concrete proof, check out two things:
- David Sifry’s State of the Blogosphere, April 2006
- Search Google Trends. It shows a comparison of what people are searching for. Compare blog, wiki, email, and excel.
Most CKOs have built their career upon investments in an older generation of technology. The right thing to do now is to give up on sunk costs, and move forward. But the right thing to do isn’t always the easiest thing to do when corporate politics rears it’s ugly head.
Today’s approach to knowledge management is all wrong.
I’ve already said success comes from empowering the knowledge worker, and not managing the knowledge.
But, empowering the knowledge worker requires a totally different kind of management technique. The difference between folksonomies and taxonomies is a great example. Wikipedia says this about folksonomies:
“A “folksonomy” is a collaboratively generated, open-ended labeling system that enables Internet users to categorize content such as Web pages, online photographs, and Web links.”
In contrast to professionally developed controlled vocabularies (also called taxonomies), folksonomies are unsystematic and, from an information scientist’s point of view, unsophisticated; however, for Internet users, they dramatically lower content categorization costs because there is no complicated, hierarchically organized nomenclature to learn. One simply creates and applies tags on the fly.
Again in contrast to controlled vocabularies or formal taxonomies, folksonomies are inherently open-ended and can therefore respond quickly to changes and innovations in the way users categorize Internet content.
The difference between using a folksonomies or taxonomies within an enterprise environment is similar to the difference between centrally planned Vs. free market economies. It is common knowledge that a free market economy is going to be more productive than a centrally planned economy. In a free market economy, the government trusts that people will produce what is needed.
In a folksonomy, end users are trusted to label things in a way that makes sense to the group as a whole.
Stu Downes has an interesting article on this topic entitled Folksonomy in the enterprise. Stu points to a great paper by Scott A. Golder and Bernardo A. Huberman of HP Labs, entitled The Structure of Collaborative Tagging Systems (pdf).
Why is this a problem for Chief Knowledge Officers? In the world of KM 1.0, they hired people who went around categorizing everything and writting complex taxonomies. Those skills are not needed when you use collaborative tagging systems such as del.icio.us.
I recently saw an example of that same top-down approach applied to sharing resumes internally at a large firm. Instead of going to a flexible folksonomy orientated Web 2.0 approach, such as using People Blogs, the firm asked each of it employees to fill out a 700 question form, which attempted to categorize every skill a person could possibly have. Needless to say, the employees have not filled out the forms.
Today’s approach to buying Knowledge Management Technology also doesn’t work
The read/write web, comprised of all the blogs and wikis and social bookmarking tools out there evolves and grows, as does the technology used to power it.
Forrester’s Charlene Li has recently published a really useful run-down of 9 of the top enterprise blogging solutions.
Included in that list are Drupal, iUpload, Roller, Movable Type, Telligent, Traction, TypePad, and WordPress.
That’s a long list, and it is just a beginning. There are numerous up and coming solutions including Blogtronix, and Microsoft’s Sharepoint 2007.
Most Chief Knowledge Officers are used to buying huge monolithic systems. They look for a standard approach that will satisfy the needs of their whole company.
That approach does not apply in the Web 2.0 world. And nor does it have to. Needing to find one universal solution is a false constraint.
The open Internet works just fine with multiple blogging systems, wiki systems, even operating systems.
Large companies do not need one universal enterprise 2.0 solution.
Instead, large organizations probably need many different tools for different types of users and different types of problems.
The guys at 37signals have written a great book on developing applications. It’s called Getting Real. If you buy or build software, you should read Getting Real. Here’s one of their suggestions:
A great way to build software is to start out by solving your own problems. You’ll be the target audience and you’ll know what’s important and what’s not. That gives you a great head start on delivering a breakout product.,
In many organizations today, there are going to be passionate users who are trying to set up internal blogs, internal wikis and other Web 2.0 tools.
Charlene Li has told me about CTOs who come to her and ask “How do I stop them? How do I control this?”
Charlene response is simple: “Why would you want to stop it? Why would you want to control it? And besides, think of all the benefits your company is getting from having a more productive, more engaged, more passionate work force.”
CTOs and CKOs may say that it is hard to run multiple platforms. The truth is that costs are not that high. Web 2.0 technology costs less than a tenth of the price of old KM systems. Web 2.0 blog servers or Wiki servers might prefer Linux and databases like MySQL. But these open source systems are cheap, if not totally free, and finding the odd additional engineer to run them isn’t that hard.
Instead of trying to focus on what ideal, one size fits all system the company needs, CKOs have to dump their old approach in favor of allowing any system, so long as it complies with some basic open Internet standards. Specifically: HTML, RSS, ATOM. The server has to work with the internal authentication system: LDAP, Novell or Active Directory. That’s it.
The Chief Knowledge Office’s Dilemma: How to deal with Web 2.0
The sea change described above will either lift the Web 2.0 empowered CKO into a position of tremendous success, or it will swamp them in an endless battle to stamp out new systems as end users inevitably try to find ways to use these tools.
1 - As a footnote to this post, I recommend reading Martin’s Roell’s article: Distributed KM - Improving Knowledge Workers’ Productivity and Organisational Knowledge Sharing with Weblog-based Personal Publishing. It is an amazing example of someone who thinks years ahead.
Very clever article. Thanks.
Rod,
Many thanks for presenting this information and the referring to the great article of Martin. This helps me a lot in convincing a few people around here!
Rod - while it may have taken me a month to catch up on your post, it is worth the wait. An important article on an important topic expressed rather well. Thanks.
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Wow, you read my mind! This is a really great commentary. I would carry it further and say knowledge translation and true interdiciplinary ventures are tied into the need for employee empowerment and effecive knowledge communication. I look forward to seen this developed further.
Agree with a great deal of the observations made, but, and it’s a big one, the “why control” statement is way off base. Or perhaps, it simply takes the easy way out and ignores what kind of control is in order.
Knowledge resources represent more than opportunity to share (and for that matter, sharing take a whole lot more than ‘cool’). The same knowledge that grounds the development of capacity carries risk and potential for serious liability. Knowledge workers get their paycheques in businesses that must be able to prove compliance with regulation governing information use, disclosure and management.
My beef with KM as typically practiced is that the focus is on technology–new or old–instead of the interrelationship between people (true knowledge resources) and the information that is captured, generated, used, applied, shared, or not in the course of business. It’s a much more complex array of inter- relationships than is typically thought, but complexity need not be complicated.
Focus on meeting the real knowledge needs of all workers–the content and presentation has to be directly relevant to getting work done. And behind the scenes, ensure that the zeal for access has not obliterated necessary controls over information management and use. Control, in my lexicon, means knowledge what exists, why, where and for how long, in what media. Then it’s about matching media characteristics to the time and use equation–with the needs of the knowledge worker at the centre.