Agenda for a KM forum
The AOK forum in which I have been participating for the last 2 years is in the process of reinventing itself – a process recommended to any organization being established for longer than it can remember for what its original purposes were.
Various propositions were made by its members as to what should be on its agenda; I can think of a few directions we can take it:
- We keep saying that KM is all about people. Let's work a bit about this entity we call people. It will take some anthropology, some sociology and psychology, and maybe some research on the cultural differences between some of us.
- We keep saying that KM is there to support enterprises thrive and survive in a competitive world. Do you really know how to relate KM to intellectual capital, and IC to the company's bottom line? If you really knew that you would have a lot more followers than you now have.
- If the first generation of KM was about the organization's memory, and the second is about knowledge flowing between people, what will be the third generation about? Can you prepare yourself for it?
- If Web 1.0 was about publishing anything to anybody, and Web 2.0 is about creating connected networks and sharing knowledge between their participants, what will be Web 3.0 about?
- If the cradle of economics was about exchanging goods for goods, and this was replaced by exchanging goods for money and vice-versa, and if knowledge performs in a reverse economical way as it doesn't diminishes when it is distributed, is there a future to a knowledge currency?
- We keep talking about knowledge and about its management. Do you know how to qualify knowledge? What is quality knowledge? How should you measure it?
- If KM was performing as QM, we would have KM standards, required by customers, and managements would court knowledge managers to make sure their organization fits some kind of CMM class. Is this something we should long for? If so, how should we proceed to make it happen?
What do you think KM forums should deal about?
Rony
I would focus efforts on two directions, one "negative", one "positive", both relate strongly and directly to value creation.
1. The "Negative" direction – I suspect a huge amount of experience, "knowledge", good practices, information are still being wasted, ignored, duplicated, arrived at a dead-end. Just to through a number here is one example– as much as 20-30% of the budget of a typical R&D operation (BIG money). So, before rushing to KM v3.0, we still need to focus efforts on KM V1 and V2 as you mentioned in your post (organizational memory, knowledge transfer). And in order to do, it is logical to do use the learning from the good old QM movement (and you proposed in one of your points) – the model of COPQ (Cost of Poor Quality), 6 sigma etc. This is related directly to the core interests and bottom line of most organizations.
2. The "positive, creative" direction – focus serious efforts on multiplying the effectiveness of creative processes, e.g. the Ideas Flows process. We see currently just the tip of the ice-berg – but there is great potential in this direction. Although we see here and there "ideas systems", "idea supporting processes" etc. – I think it is still an unexplored area.
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Thank you Ron and let's remember it for the f2f. I assume that by negative you don't mean the lack of positive!
(Hmmm... Tough!)
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Of course not. I just meant to say that in KM that there are still huge opportunities in both reducing waste and in creating new directions, ideas, products etc.
And, these two sides of the coin are related, and it make sense to focus on both.
Ron
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