KM - Hit or Myth?A KM Conference Presentation

made in Toronto, Ontario

An Opening Word

• “For (years) business leaders have taught bureaucracy-busting, teamwork coaching, etc. Here’s all you really need to know: provide safe places where people can share ideas about work without getting shut down by bosses and bureaucrats”.– Thomas Stewart: Intellectual Capital,

The New Wealth of Organizations

“The Work of New Age Managers” is:•Conceive and Execute Complex Strategies•Share and Protect Intellectual Property•Manage the Public-private Interface•Provide Intellectual and Administrative Leadership

C.K. Prahalad in The Organization of the Future by the Drucker Foundation

Project success depends on (besides strict ROI), “impacts on customer relationships, intellectual capital growth, and organizational learning and process improvement.”

Howard Rubin

Management theory, according to the case against it, has four defects: it is constitutionally incapable of self-criticism; its terminology usually confuses rather than educates; it rarely rises above basic common sense; and it is faddish and bedevilled by contradictions that would not be allowed in more rigorous disciplines.The implications of all four charges is that management gurus are con artists, the witch doctors of our age, playing on business people’s anxieties in order to sell snake oil.

The gurus, many of whom have sprung suspiciously from “the great university of life” rather than any orthodox academic discipline, exist largely because people let them get away with it. Modern management theory is no more reliable than tribal medicine. Witch doctors, after all, often got it right - by luck, by instinct, or by trial and error.

(Micklethwait and Wooldridge, 1996)

Knowledge Management:Fact or fluff?

Finding a start point

•Define the nature of the enterprise and what it is doing, and why •Define the resource requirements….including both information and knowledge•Imagine how you might do what you are doing better•Consider the notion of “enterprise management”

What “KM” is not

• IT asset planning• Intellectual asset marketing• Data warehousing or “Business Intelligence”• Information repositories• The Internet and / or a corporate web site• A “killer ap”• A stovepipe solution

The Issue of Utility

• In Records Management: know the context within which information was created (source)

• In Knowledge Management: to know in order to act intelligently (application)

Operationalization

• Be careful about process models (much of IM and KM is concerned with intangibles that do not respond well to normal asset and logistical management practices.

• Valuation is really, really problematic. • Organizational structures can be troublesome • Business and work rules may be way out of step..

…(e.g. empowerment).

The Gartner Group KM Process Framework (1)

• The meaning of "knowledge management" remains elusive, is difficult for sponsors to advocate and explain, and is easily abused by vendors and service providers.

The Gartner Group KM Process Framework (2)

• A revised definition of KM: "Knowledge management is a discipline that

promotes a collaborative and integrated approach to the creation, capture, organization, access and use of an enterprise's information assets. This includes databases, documents and, most importantly, the uncaptured, tacit expertise and experience of individual workers."

The Key Work in KM is…..

Discipline: "branch of instruction" (the field)

Discipline: "methods or rules for conduct" (the rules)

Discipline: "training of the mind" (the self)

Building a KM Model www.modusoperandi.com

•Augment activities that surround learning•Relate KM aims to process to technology•Make the process practice-driven

- “KM is a collection of practices that support learning and knowledge creation as an auxiliary process running parallel to the value chain”.- “This requires cultural support, incentives and training in the principles of the discipline of learning.”

The myth and the hit

• The KM myth is that:– information is a product / resource that just

needs to be “managed” - as a transport problem – there are generic package solutions to unique

problems and challenges– IT is a necessary but not sufficient pre-

condition to KM (and IM)– KM can be “rolled out”

What is the hit?

• Building the spirit and fact of “enterprise”• Linking input to output; action to mission

• Identifying and deploying resources (human et al)

• Defining the base event requirements

• Supporting knowledgeable management and knowledgeable workers

What is the hit? (2)

• Diffusing expertise centres (watch out for “communities of practice”)

• Distributing professional / “managerial” functions (watch out for “webmasters”)

• Enhancing mobile capability (internal and marketplace)

• Enabling effective work systematization and IT architecting

KM Presents an Opportunity

To bring together what we have learnedabout work, management and information technology in a way that will profit all the players.

Co-ordinates

David G. JonesShibumi.management@gmail.com

The 2300 year old roots of KM are here:http://www.slideshare.net/ShibumiMC/asst-press-release-01-2013