This discussion of John Tropea’s two blog entries of March 17th and 18th 2008, has turned into a series within a series. I guess that’s a measure of what happens in this blog medium. That is, if you feel like saying more about something, there’s always another blog tomorrow. No one can tell you that you’ve got too many pages! This one will cover John’s treatment of KM 2.0 in his presentation on KM 2.0.
John does this in four slides. In those slides KM 2.0 is characterized as “social computing.” The tools identified are wikis, blogs, social networking software, and tag clouds. Wikis are seen as collaborations, shared spaces, with a sense of place. They’re seen as a gateway to the best in the Document Management System, and as relieving the over-use of e-mail.
Blogs are viewed as providing a sense of place, easy to create unstructured free-form content, a place to make comments, to editorialize in an informal way, to develop a work in progress in fragments rather than as a finished product, as working with a subscribe model, providing a trusted social filter, providing news for one another, and as providing a centralized searchable archive.
Social networking software includes: profile pages, subscription capability, private/public messages, a home for blogs, support for communities, expertise locator, support for querying the network, public bookmarks and link blogging, and presence awareness and micro-blogging.
As I mentioned in my first post on John’s blogs, he distinguishes his notion of “the New KM,” from KM 2.0, which he characterizes as “social computing.” I think this distinction is good because it distinguishes the tools from KM itself, at least to some degree. Thus, social computing, or KM 2.0, is only one aspect of his “new KM,” which is conceptualized as an ecological system, rather than as an activity, a class of activities, or a discipline. On the other hand, the view of KM as an ecological system clearly conflates one of the outcomes of successful KM and knowledge processing with KM as something we do, an activity or class of activities. So, let’s now distinguish a) KM, b) the ecological system which we might view as the longer term systemic goal of KM, and c) the software tools of social computing. Now, let’s address the question of the impact of the introduction of social computing tools into organizations.
After presenting the KM 2.0 tools, John talks about anticipated impacts, including:
— increased chance of “bumping into somebody in the coffee room by infinity,”
— enabling tuning “into a knowledge flow,”
— increasing the number of people you trust,
— providing high abstraction communication at “similar wavelengths,”
— increasing distribution of contributions to content and increasing transparency,
— increasing the number of weak social ties cutting across the hierarchy that can tie one into relevant information relatively quickly,
— creating greater frequency of communications cutting across the organizational hierarchy,
— increases in networking effects due to aggregation of widely distributed information, and
— increases in emergent patterns of content and self-organization.
He also points out that apart from the need for facilitators to support communities, there is no KM here, because people are just working by themselves in a social way.
Let’s consider the last point first, doesn’t the view that KM 2.0 can be done “without KM” assume that the network of blogs, wikis, and social networking tools that is KM 2.0 can function in enterprises without any regulation or maintenance? Doesn’t it assume that a kind of unregulated free marketplace of ideas will function smoothly without the need for management intervention? Is that reasonable? What about software updates? What about cultural norms to prevent the social exchanges from tending toward extreme conflict? What about cultural norms and interaction rules to prevent the development of communitarian conformity in informal social interactions? What about development of rules for knowledge claim evaluation? What happens if the rules that develop in the emergent patterns are authoritarian? Is there anything in “KM 2.0” to prevent that from occurring? What about encouraging the development of new ideas in the new exchange networks? Can laissez-faire ensure originality, or should knowledge managers introduce other processes to supplement KM 2.0 tools and to encourage people to “think outside the box.”
Granted, that KM 2.0 tools are useful in helping people to get more involved in exchanging knowledge claims and even in collaborating in this task, and more generally. But once having helped the enterprise by helping to introduce these tools, is the work of Knowledge Managers really done, or is this just an appeal to return KM to the good old days when it was all done so very well informally, without benefit of even a name? Forgive me, but I think that doesn’t work. However good our knowledge processing in an organization may appear it is only “good” relative to the knowledge processing of one’s most competent competitor. It’s the job of KM to ensure that the adaptive/problem solving capacity of one’s organization is sufficient to cope with the challenges presented by the organization’s environment. To the extent that capacity falls short, or may fall short in the future, It’s very important for an organization to ensure that its knowledge processing is of higher quality than that of its competitors.
Now let’s analyze the relationship of John’s claimed KM 2.0 impacts to enhanced knowledge processing.
— increased chance of “bumping into somebody in the coffee room by infinity”
JMF: KM 2.0 clearly multiplies opportunities for sharing and broadcasting knowledge and/or information once knowledge has been produced.
— enabling tuning “into a knowledge flow”
JMF: Provided there is a “knowledge flow.” That is, the fact that people can tune into additional communication encouraged by KM 2.0 may mean that they’re tuning into “just information,” or low quality knowledge. There’s nothing in KM 2.0 tools that ensures higher quality knowledge claim evaluation, and if an enterprise’s internal culture is such that it encourages low quality knowledge claim evaluation, then the introduction of KM 2.0 tools won’t work to improve the quality of knowledge.
— increasing the number of people you trust,
JMF: This is important. But I don’t know that there’s anything in KM 2.0 tools that inherently builds trust. What they build is exchange and communication. Sometimes this does build trust. Sometimes it builds distrust. Which happens, depends on a complex of cultural and leadership factors that I don’t believe are addressed by KM 2.0 tools directly
— providing high abstraction communication at “similar wavelengths,”
JMF: This kind of communication can be very useful for advancing exchanges of knowledge claims including critical exchanges and testing of claims. However, KM 2.0 tools don’t guarantee that critical exchanges and testing will occur. A culture has to exist where critical exchange and testing is considered legitimate, and KM 2.0 tools don’t, by themselves encourage the development of such a culture where none exists.
— increasing distribution of contributions to content and increasing transparency
JMF: Increased internal transparency and epistemic inclusiveness in knowledge processing are two of the requirements of the Open Enterprise, and this effect of KM 2.0 tools is all to the good.
— increasing the number of weak social ties cutting across the hierarchy that can tie one into relevant information relatively quickly,
JMF: This seems like a highly probable effect of KM 2.0 tools on knowledge processing which certainly enhances it.
— creating greater frequency of communications cutting across the organizational hierarchy,
JMF: I think this helps organizational integration, but greater frequency in communications may or may not enhance knowledge processing. In fact such an increase may sometimes do not more than to increase “information glut.”
— increases in networking effects due to aggregation of widely distributed information
JMF: The networking effects can have a very positive impact on the formation of global patterns of knowledge claims. But depending on cultural norms, such networking effects can represent lower, rather than higher quality knowledge processing. Whether they do or not depends on how the networking effects interact with non-dominant knowledge claims, and specifically on the pattern and effects of downward causation on the continued formation of alternatives to the dominant knowledge claims. KM 2.0 tools cannot guarantee that continued openness in exchange will be supported in the face of developing cultural consensus on certain patterns of knowledge claims. It’s the culture surrounding the use of KM 2.0 tools that will determine that.
— increases in emergent patterns of content and self-organization
JMF: This impact is closely related to the last one. KM 2.0 tools may initially lead to increases in emergent patterns of content and self-organization; but will this impact be maintained on a continuing basis or will patterns of content and knowledge, prevent other patterns of content and self-organization from emerging, once the previous emergent patterns become established? That is, what is there in KM 2.0 tools that guarantees the sustainability of self-organization and emergence of new content in organizations?
In sum, while I found John Tropea’s March 17th and March 18th blogs on KM 2.0, and his presentation on KM 2.0 of great interest. I conclude that his treatment of:
a) KM 1.0 as focused on operational, routine business processing, while ignoring “exception handling” is overdrawn, but that many “KM” projects, right up to the present, are about enhancing “knowledge sharing” in support of operational business processing and are not about “exception handling,” problem solving, or innovation. Such projects, however, are often not KM projects, but, in fact, are information management projects using the KM label. This is so because these projects have no way of distinguishing “knowledge” from “just information,” so what they are enhancing is processes of information flow and they include no capability for measuring whether or not they are enhancing actual knowledge sharing.
b) “the New KM” as an ecological system conflates a view of an ecological system that may be a desirable outcome of KM with KM activities themselves. It is this conflation that contributes to John’s implied conclusion that once KM 2.0 tools encourage formation of such an ecology, that KM itself can dispensed with;
c) knowledge as both “a thing” and “a flow” runs counter to all previous work in philosophy and psychology about the character of knowledge as a thing; and
d) KM 2.0 as having positive impacts has a great deal of merit when analyzed against the specific criterion of whether or not these impacts are enhancements of knowledge processing. But it is also the case that these impacts fall short of enhancing key aspects of knowledge processing and certainly don’t remove the need for continuing KM activity and further enhancement of an ecology of rationality that will support knowledge processing on a sustainable basis.
So, in light of these conclusions, let us view “KM 2.0” for what it is, a new generation of IT tools that may enhance both KM intervention possibilities, and many knowledge processing activities, and that we should use freely along with other available tools and, soon, with the 3.0 and even later tools that are soon to become available to us. But let us recognize that software tools are only instruments of KM. KM is made up of strategies, ecologies, policies, programs, projects, procedures, techniques, and processes, and finally software tools. KM 2.0 is only one aspect of this complex, and therefore we need to contain our enthusiasm for it, and to view in the context of both other tools and KM as a whole. Only then will we get the full benefit of KM 2.0 tools.
To Be Continued