Some interesting thoughts on weblogs, knowledge management, and the need for the process of KM to start with the individual first, rather than being imposed from above from McGee’s Musings. Reflecting on my own experiments with KM systems, much of what’s being said here rings true.
I’d have to agree with the contention that weblogs have some potentially significant advantages as KM tools. There’s little doubt they’re easier to use than the rather cumbersome corporate KM tools that have been tried over the past decade. They are more natural in style for people to use, and, since they don’t require elaborate taxonomies to be created before any tacit knowledge can be entered into them, they’re a lot easier to set up. I disagree with the criticism that getting people to enter information into KM systems has never been a problem - my experience is just the contrary; people won’t do it unless you stand over them with a club and make them do it, and they’ll stop as soon as you remove the stick. More on this later, because it has some implications for using weblogs as a KM tool, as well.
I can agree with the criticism that search and retrieval interfaces do leave a lot to be desired when considering weblogs as a KM tool. Let’s face it, weblogging tools as they currently exist weren’t specifically designed for KM work, but rather as more of a diary. The chronological organization of most weblogging tools works for a series of personal posts in diary format, but presents a problem from a KM perspective, where most search tasks are going to be topically oriented rather than time oriented. Where KM’s concerned, we’re generally less interested in what was said last Tuesday than what was said about something, and in what context. “Retail” weblogging tools really aren’t yet optimized for doing this. The problem is magnified further when considering a “pool” or cluster of weblogs inside an enterprise - if there’s no well-configured enterprise-wide search tool that catalogues all the blogs in the company, then knowledge search and retrieval becomes an effort in trying to manually parse each individual blog - certainly an effort destined to doom the weblog as a KM tool. It isn’t that creating more KM-centric search tools and interfaces for searching weblogs is technically infeasible, it’s just that no one that I know has developed a nicely packaged solution for this yet. We’re still in the early stages of adoption, using a tool designed for public consumption for a more specialized purpose. We have a lot of stuff that’s close, like Manila, but no one has yet fielded something that’s obviously and clearly purpose-built for corporate weblogs as a KM tool. I suspect there’s a market opportunity, there.
There’s a much broader issue, though, addressed in McGee’s post - the need for people to realize that KM begins at an individual level, with an individual decision to capture and manage knowledge more effectively. This is a cultural change that’s important not only for knowledge workers to understand if KM is going to be effective, but for KM professionals to grasp, as well. Any company that’s serious about trying KM almost always hires or appoints someone to be their KM guru - and that’s the guy with the stick I mentioned above. It’s also why most KM efforts never really amount to anything. Having the wrong tools is only half the problem (or maybe less, like 5% of the problem). The larger issue is that the process of turning tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge isn’t something we’re acculturated to do. If fact, through our schooling (Keep your eyes on your own paper! Don’t share answers, that’s cheating!), and through our work life (Don’t share your idea with Bob, he’ll take credit for it!), we’re taught to do just the opposite. When we seek to impose KM processes with a hierarchical, top-down process, we exacerbate the problem. We’re not only struggling to overcome the laziness that McGee talks about, we’re fighting our own acculturation, and we’re doing it in a manner that almost uniformly provokes resistance and bad feeling.
Weblogs as a KM tool have a lot to offer, and are at least part of the solution to this problem, given their inherent bottom-up, individually driven nature. Unfortunately, I can see some companies, once blogging has sufficiently penetrated the corporate brain that it starts to seem attractive, buying up a bunch of copies of Radio and issuing a dictate that everyone will henceforth start blogging as a means to facilitate KM in the company. That effort will fail, just like other efforts at KM before it failed, and people will once again point at it and proclaim the KM doesn’t work, or that the tools still aren’t sophisticated enough to do the job. It doesn’t have to be that way, though.
