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Blog148: May 24, 2006; Posted by Jordan Frank;  3 Attachments |
 When I saw Michael Koenig's article in KM World, KM: the forest for all the trees,
I thought this might be another story about how ECM can save paper. No,
Koenig explains that KM is far from a fad, and took a stab at defining
knowledge management. |
Previous management fads (as measured by the number of articles in
the business literature on the topic) showed a consistent pattern of
boom and bust over a roughly 10-year cycle, with four or five years of
explosive logarithmic growth, followed by an only slightly longer
period of almost equally dramatic decline.
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KM by contrast, takes off slowly, launches with the tech bubble in
1999, settles a bit, and grows steadily between 2000 and 2005 with a spike in 2002. |
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Many people try to grapple with the KM Term. Kaye Vivian wrote about a need for a KM definition and a unifying theory. |
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Koenig claims by
metaphor that "KM is the name for the forest of information, content,
knowledge and IT management." |
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Running with the metaphor, I will argue that Blogs are one of forest's most essential knowledge assets: they are the path. |
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When blogs became popular in 2002, they were thought by many to be just another of the fad's Koenig refers
to. David Sifry's latest State of the Blogosphere
shows the opposite trend, sustained growth for blogs on the public web: |
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We can't measure the growth of enterprise blogs deployed behind the
firewall (see Public279: 13 June 2005 | Dark Blogs Case Study #1 - A European Pharmaceutical Group) as discreetly, but its fair to say that a
similar pattern is developing, albeit at lower total numbers.
Enterprise Blogs play a key role in KM because they hold the narrative
that
shows a path through the information in the metaphorical forest. Blogs
(and the bloggers
that fill them) tend to provide links to key reference information in
their narrative over time. |
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John Monroe's coverage of FCW's Knowledge Management conference last month included a story titled Knowledge Lies in Narrative. In it, Munroe details a session led by Gary Klein, chief scientist at Klein Associates. |
A narrative approach makes it much easier to delve into experts'
thought processes, which is where real knowledge is to be found, Klein
said.
It is usually easier to teach people by developing a series of
vignettes that bring that tacit knowledge to life for others. That is
the point of knowledge management. “It is not enough to elicit
information,” Klein said. “You have to be able to represent it so other
people can use it."
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Klein is referring to exactly the sort of narrative that weblogs to deliver so well. |
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By
making comments on and linking between trees (knowledge assets stored
in any ECM, DM, KM, Collaborative Workspace or other information
system),
Blogs show the knowledge traveler what's important (amongst a list of
disconnected content and similarly ranked search results) and how to
find the
way through a dense and otherwise difficult to navigate (and
understand)
forest. The
information in the blogs themselves may conisist of pointers to
knowledge content, or may be 'the content' itself. So new trees may
grow
out of the communication conveyed over time in the enterprise blogs. |
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