Yesterday, I offered a high-level case for Federal Knowledge Management. But I did oversimplify things a bit, to keep my post short. The complication I didn’t want to introduce earlier is the idea that Knowledge Management already exists in every locale within the Federal Government, whether we think it does or not, and whether we want it to or not. So, it’s not so much that the Federal Government needs Knowledge Management, as it needs much better and more successful Knowledge Management than now.
This, of course, depends on how one defines Knowledge Management. If one defines it, as I did, as activity intended to enhance seeing problems for what they are, solving them in a way that is lasting and sustainable, and communicating the results to all who may need them, then it’s pretty clear that such activity is a natural aspect of human behavior, and occurs in any reasonably enduring cluster of social interaction, like a Government agency, inter-agency team or task force, or any other Government institution. On the other hand, even though Knowledge Management occurs naturally, it may not be seen as an identifiable class of activities, it may not be formal. It may not be studied or pursued with any discipline, or with any cumulative learning over time. In short, even though in may be done in one way or another all over the Government. It is rarely done well. But is mostly done in a half-conscious, ad hoc, and unsystematic fashion.
If this account is right, the Federal Government really doesn’t have any choice about whether or not to do Knowledge Management. Instead, it’s choice is whether to do it in a half-conscious, ad hoc, and unsystematic way, and as a result, mostly not very well; or, whether, to develop it as a systematic Federal Program governed by vision, a discipline, and a culture of systematic knowledge and practice that grows over time. In my view there’s only one real choice here, and that’s to acknowledge KM and to formulate an explicit Government policy and programs governing it. There may be room for disagreement about such issues as whether we should start a National KM Center or not; or where it should be located within the Federal Government if we have one; or how decentralized the KM network should be; or whether all or even many agencies should have formal KM efforts run by a local CKO. But the notion that national policy should be just to ignore Knowledge Management and let it continue to proceed entirely informally, as it has for most of human history, seems to make no sense. To suggest that KM in Government should rely entirely on the forces of self-organization, with no central web of policy guiding it, is to counsel that anarchy is better than deliberate human organization in the KM domain. But we have no reason to believe that, since it has not been our experience in any other area of management.