Sims Learning Connections

Jon Husband’s recent interview of Dave Snowden regarding “The impact of Web 2.0 on Knowledge Work and Knowledge Management” is an outstanding KM 1.0 retrospective requiem. The conversation is more of what I had hoped to hear from Dave at the Boston KM Forum a few weeks earlier — alas, the KM Forum content was a bit more a catch-up on some of Dave’s post-IBM work and thinking, and although valuable as that, it didn’t connect-the-dots between the past and the future as well as this ‘podcast’ did. Now, taking the two conversations together, I feel have closer to the snapshot I needed, and I couldn’t be more thrilled.

Dave is able to articulate better than I ever could much of what my gut has been trying to tell me as I reflect back on my journey as a Director of a KM group vintage 1999-2005 and as I look forward to a potential return to a similar role within a different company (next round of interviews willing.)

My main take-aways are the following, which are heavily paraphrased to facilitate my own recall and application:

• KM got too hung-up on trying to structure what fundamentally can’t be structured — note to self: include historical approach to communities of practice here, as well as the even more obvious “the big library in the sky” approaches with their desire to “capture or harvest knowledge.”
• If you are asking “how to create a knowledge sharing culture?,” you really don’t understand. It is a stupid question. Rather, ask “what you can do to encourage and facilitate connections?” Leading to…the best role for a KM Director today is to help facilitate connections.
• Knowledge transfer is, and needs, to be self-organizing
• Never use rewards or incentives for information contributions as this leads to gaming by those that are better at managing than at creating/innovating
• The KM journey from ten years ago would have been much more successful if it had the Web 2.0 tools of today
• The concept of a “knowledge audit” is misplaced as “audit” implies static physical assets. Knowledge is created at the moment of need, not something that is available as if inventory on the shelf.
• Work with business processes from top-down and knowledge objects (anything that we can coherently manage) from bottom-up.
• We do need some level of structure to facilitate recall and findability
• And, computers can’t successfully tag content. The author/speaker must label their own content. Their ‘naming’ is critical and typical will be words that do not appear in the narrative itself (Dave also discussed this at the Boston event)
• Similar to KM (as practiced in its first ten years), centralized standardized dictated IT is going to need to go away. Security concerns are real and should focus on protecting corporate data, not in regimenting the means of collaboration.
• Human Resources (HR) is also in for a rough ride as successful companies move to more self-organizing of work…including people, tools and methods.

Note: Dave published Jon’s interview question outline on his own blog — this is useful to have open while listening to the recording from Jon’s site, which has the better audio.

Closing note: especially the last two bullets connect nicely with another of my favorite links this week: James Governor’s The World Beyond the LAN: Trust and Human Resources where he writes:

Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0 and so on are not matters for IT professionals to decide, really. They are questions for managing directors and human resources professionals. If you want to hire top talent you need to trust people and help them become even more effective. Shutting things down won’t cut it. Is training required alongside the trust? Absolutely. Does your corporation need clear policies about acceptable behaviour, online and off? Obviously.