This month has seen the production of two very different perspectives on Knowledge Management. The positive view, from APQC, is entitled Using Knowledge Management to Drive Innovation. The negative view, from KM & innovation consultant Patrick Lambe, is entitled The Autism of Knowledge Management.
The APQC report was prepared by a team that includes some of KM’s most articulate champions, including the Center’s president Carla O’Dell, who I’ve had the pleasure of speaking with, and HBS Professor Dorothy Leonard, author of one of the books that put KM on the business map, Wellsprings of Knowledge. The report was undertaken with the help of about 30 private and public organization sponsors and studied seven organizations, including NASA, 3M and the World Bank, to ascertain the connection between KM and innovation. There were 15 key findings:
The executive summary of the report can be downloaded free, and you can buy the complete report from the APQC website.
The Autism of Knowledge Management trashes the KM establishment (including some of the organizations that participated in the IPQC study) for its inward-looking obsession with knowledge content (captured knowledge ‘objects’), and its inadequate attention to improving connectivity and community. He cites Cisco early embracing of the concept of reusable ‘learning objects’, and their abandonment in favour of a knowledge-in-context- through-connectivity strategy. He blames IT and taxonomic thinkers for trying to reduce KM to a mechanical exercise of breaking what we know down into discrete ‘objects’, saying that such an approach is incompatible how we share knowledge and learn. He then goes on to identify five somewhat overlapping organizational information ‘myths’ that he thinks has led KM in the wrong direction:
Author Lambe certainly has high expectations of KM. In his concluding section, he states that good KM systems might — perhaps even should — have prevented the World Trade Center attacks, the Challenger disaster, and the spread of BSE (Mad Cow disease) and SARS. To put it mildly, I think that underestimates our capacity for human error, no matter how good the systems we have at our disposal. The complete paper, and other articles on KM and innovation, are available at Lambe’s Green Chameleon site.
The truth, as is usually the case, is likely somewhere between the APQC’s ebullient optimism and Lambe’s relentless pessimism. Both studies raise some interesting questions about the re-usability of captured knowledge content, and the need for more attention in KM to connectivity and collaboration. But while both reports talk about high-level strategies, neither offers a specific prescription on how to overcome these problems and get KM back on the right track. Until I hear something better, I’m sticking with the Social Network Enablement roadmap I proposed earlier. |
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“The Myth of Reusability — that knowledge taken from one context can be readily re-used in another ” ::: Please i would like to know authors views on Why and How on the above (“”) statement.