All Life Is Problem Solving

The topic of the Boston KM Forum on April 9, 2008 was “KM 2.0 – Real or Hype?” Let’s review presentations given at the meeting. Mark Frydenberg offered an excellent slide show called “Web 2.0 Tools for Knowledge Management.” Its strength was its coverage of Web 2.0. It included a slide with a number of embedded YouTube videos from Michael Wesch a professor of cultural anthropology teaching Digital Ethnography at Kansas State University. These videos have a great deal of impact in conveying the message that Web 2.0 is really a game changer in increasing the capacity of the web to help us to create a new level of self-organization of our ideas and views of the world. In addition, Mark provides a very useful slide identifying some 170 Web 2.0 product vendors. Other slides provide comparisons of Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 using a very useful tag cloud from Luca Cremonini to characterize Web 2.0. He also provides good material on social bookmarking and tagging, and a nice section on mash-ups, which however, is a little too narrow in scope to cover the full range of mash-up applications. A good site for that is Kapow Technologies.

Where Mark Frydenberg sheds a lot less light, is in the area of the presentation dealing with KM and its relationship to Web 2.0. First, Mark doesn’t provide a definition of KM but does provide a slide entitled “Web 2.0 and Knowledge Management” that appears intended to relate the two. Its content is:

”– Share what you have learned, created, proved

 

— Innovate to be more creative, inventive, imaginative

 

— Reuse what others have already done

 

— Collaborate to take advantage of what others already know

 

— Learn by doing from others and from existing information”

While “share,” “Innovate,” and “learn” can certainly be viewed as “knowledge processing,” “reuse” and “collaborate” are as much about routine business processing, as they are about knowledge processing, and I don’t see anything in this list that’s directly focused on KM. I also don’t see anything that relates specific Web 2.0 applications to the five bullet points. I suspect Mark thinks that Web 2.0 applications are clearly related to these things. But I don’t think the relationship to anything except collaboration, and I’m afraid that collaboration is not, in itself, knowledge processing.

In a slide “entitled “2. – Social Media and Collaboration,” Mark says: “Managing Knowledge – take advantage of what other people know!” This is also part of the Collaborate tag line in the list above. Does this mean that, for Mark Frydenberg, KM means taking “advantage of what people know”? If so, Mark Frydenberg has a vastly mistaken impression, perhaps gleaned from a presentation of Stan Garfield’s which he cites in his KM slide. In sum, Mark’s presentation is excellent in the area of Web 2.0, but really falls short in relating Web 2.0 to KM.

A second presentation by Dan Keldsen entitled “Enterprise 2.0 = Knowledge Management 2.0”. Dan provides two definitions for E 2.0. The first is Andrew McAfee’s:

“Enterprise 2.0 is the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers.”

The second is AIIM‘s:

“A system of web-based technologies that provide rapid and agile collaboration, information sharing, emergence and integration capabilities in the extended enterprise.”

I, myself, prefer McAfee’s definition because it is cleaner and leads to easier assessment of the impact of tools alone. But the import of AIIM’s definition is clear. Apart from the 2.0 tools, it’s about rapid and agile collaboration, information sharing, emergence, and integration capabilities in the extended enterprise. All of these are important, but nowhere in this definition is there an a plain implication of the relationship of E 2.0 to KM or “KM 2.0.” Let’s see how Dan develops the relationship. The first thing he does is to offer Carl Frappaolo’s definition of KM as:

“Leveraging collective wisdom and experience to accelerate innovation and responsiveness”

I’m afraid I have no idea what “leveraging collective wisdom and experience . . . “ means. That phrase seems to replace one problem of definition with another. I also am not sure what’s meant by “responsiveness,” but insofar as it refers to decision making and action, rather than knowledge processing, I don’t think it’s directly related to KM. I do think that KM is about enhancing innovation in the very broad sense of problem solving, plus integration of new solutions into an enterprise. But, more precisely, I think it’s about enhancing sustainable innovation, and that anything else it is about is related to that governing idea in a supportive fashion.

Dan next goes on to talk about “KM 1.0,” and states the following about it: a) automatic analysis of e-mail patterns too much carried away with technology (“20 algorithms for extracting “knowledge” from the information flows”), b) Too little “painful knowledgebase interfaces for inputs (and outputs)” and individual short-term incentives, c) “lack of attention to culture (you get what you reward), and to teaming, teaming, long-term incentives, teaming, teaming,” d) systems where “big brother is watching you,” and e) “academic theory collides with reality.” Now, I think that, by-and-large, and if we agree that KM 1.0 is everything preceding “KM 2.0,” if, in fact, this is a coherent idea, then I think that this account of “KM 1.0” is seriously misleading. KM before the introduction of E 2.0 tools, has been a complex mosaic of diverse and often conflicting approaches.

One can get some of the flavor of this from an essay of mine and Mark McElroy called “Generations of KM.” But, since 2002, when that paper was written, KM has become even more diverse, and I can tell you it has not been mostly about automatic analysis of e-mail, and “lack of attention to culture.” It has not ignored teaming and has had very strong commitment to communities. It has not been about “big brother is watching you,” and as far as academic theory colliding with reality is concerned, it’s problem is that it has not relied enough on academic theory in such disciplines as philosophy, cognitive science, sociology, and organization theory. So rather than academic theory colliding with reality it has been a case of “practical people” running from fad-to-fad in an effort to master a stubborn reality that needs much more careful theory to solve its problems.

But then Dan goes on to point out that “KM 1.0” has frequently failed and that “knowledge remains blocked,” a point I largely agree with. KM has not had a great deal of success in general.

Dan then makes the point that Web 2.0 might enable us to unlock the knowledge that is in people’s heads, and he proceeds to point out that the primary issues of KM still remain. According to Dan, these issues are: a) brains, b) tools (Is e-mail the devil? Is it an abused tool?) and c) slowly changing culture. He then asks about “the solution.” And answers, 1) “capture knowledge work as daily work” (don’t capture knowledge separately), 2) recognize that knowledge is information applied and re-used, not just collected, 3) create a feedback enriching and simplifying knowledge, and 4) recognizing that good KM is about “loops and emergence.” Dan then went on to illustrate loops with John Boyd’s Observe, Orient, Decide, Act (OODA Loop), and the Wiki Adoption Loop (Agenda, Minutes, Projects, Tasks). He then moves on to a discussion of AIIM’s survey of E 2.0 and begins to report on some results.

The AIIM study measured the “KM inclination” of an enterprise by “using 12 weighted profiling questions taken from KM2 Methodology.” Generally it found that the “KM inclined” were more involved with E 2.0 efforts on a number of dimensions of involvement. After examining this “overlap” between “KM-inclination” and E 2.0, Dan concludes by asking again whether E2.0 and KM 2.0 are the same thing.

Frankly, while I think the empirical results of the AIIM study are interesting, I think the overlaps found don’t really illuminate the relationship between KM and E 2.0 as a conceptual matter, since the fact that the “KM-inclined” are disproportionately concerned with E 2.0 says nothing about either whether use of E 2.0 in KM leads to good results, or about the conceptual relationship between KM 2.0 and E2.0, and these points don’t even consider a third, namely that the measurement of “KM-inclined” is likely to be very problematic if one assumes that the profile questions reflects some of the theoretical ideas about KM expressed above. In brief, I would have been happier if Dan had taken his conceptual analysis further and ended with a conjectured answer to the question he posed, that, at least, would have focused more attention on the notion of KM that AIIM is working with, and its relation to E 2.0. In my next installment, I’ll continue with a discussion of two other presentations from the Boston KM Forum.

To Be Continued

Over the past week, I’ve taken a break from this series, but I think that now is a good time to get back to it, since there’s still much to do. In April of 2008, the debate over KM 2.0 received a number of interesting contributions. The first I’ll consider here is Mike Gotta’s blog entry of April 6, called “AIIM Completes Enterprise 2.0 Study.” Gotta takes the completion of the report as an occasion for considering what Enterprise 2.0 means and whether the collection of Enterprise 2.0 tools “amounts to anything.” Mike speaks favorably of Andrew McAfee’s original definition and quotes it as: “Enterprise 2.0 is the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers.”

He then adds:

The only caveat that I have added to McAfee’s phrasing when I discuss E2.0 with clients or people in general is to phrase E2.0 as “the emergent use of social software platforms” vs. “use of emergent software platforms” which I believe preserves Mr. McAfee’s original intent.

 

I can’t say whether Professor McAfee meant what he said or meant what Mike said, but either way Mike’s construction makes clear that he thinks E 2.0 requires that the use of social software involve “emergence” in the social interaction resulting from using the software. Mike also proposes using Clay Shirky’s definition of social software as: “software designed for group interaction” to further clarify the definition of E 2.0. He then points out that:

We (as an industry) are still remiss in associating Enterprise 2.0 as a specific set of tools. That clouds the role of culture and other organizational dynamics which are so influential on “emergence”. What we also need is to a better job at is defining the use case scenarios and usage models around information sharing, communication and collaboration tools that make something “E2.0” (basically, adding legs under McAfee’s and Shirky’s definitions).

 

Here Mike Gotta is suggesting that use of E 2.0 tools is not enough to justify calling an organization E 2.0. To do that one also has to show that an appropriate cultural configuration and organizational dynamics giving rise to emergence are also present. And he drives home this point in the remainder of his post. While I can see the point of extending E 2.0 beyond the tools to include such social and cultural system requirements before the concept is applicable, I think the attempt to make these conditions a requirement for characterizing an organization as E 2.0 goes too far, because it makes the connection between E 2.0 and emergence as well as certain cultural and organizational characteristics a matter of definition rather than a matter of theory.

That is, in some sense isn’t the point of talking about E 2.0 to say that if one introduces an E 2.0 program then one will get certain beneficial social and cultural changes including increased collaboration, communication, and information sharing as a consequence of this introduction? But if E 2.0 is made to include these things then their connection to E 2.0 is made true by definition and where is the fun or the gain in that? But still further, if we define E 2.0 in a way that goes beyond McAfee’s definition above, then what’s to prevent us from saying that certain KM and knowledge processing characteristics are also included and therefore to begin to approach Tom Davenport’s claim that E 2.0 and KM are one and the same? Mike’s blog entry is an indication of the continuing difficulties in 2008 of clarifying relationships among KM, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, and collaboration. Tomorrow, I’ll take up this theme again in a discussion of presentations given at the Boston KM Forum.

To Be Continued

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

This entry continues the discussion of John Tropea’s “Knowledge Management as an Ecosystem.” In Part Twelve, I reviewed and critiqued a portion of the presentation up through the discussion of “the new KM.” Here, I’ll focus on John’s treatment of “the nature of knowledge” and in my next blog I’ll discuss his characterization of KM 2.0.

John begins by referring to the “need to understand the organics of knowledge,” and says that he is “more naturally favourable to flow model rather than a content management model.” He then moves on to consider heuristics for approaching “knowledge” offered by Dave Snowden and others.

An immediate problem with this approach is that it avoids John’s view about “the nature of knowledge.” There are disputes out there in philosophy and KM about whether knowledge is biological, mental, or cultural in character. Also, Dave Snowden thinks that knowledge has a dualistic nature and is both a thing and a flow, a view that I’ve critiqued in the past, and that, incidentally, has little basis in either philosophy or neural science. (Not that knowledge flow doesn’t exist. It does. But the fact that knowledge flows, doesn’t mean that knowledge is a flow.) I’m not claiming that John ought to get into these disputes in his presentation, but I am saying that if he’s not clear about his view of these things, then he’s hardly providing his view of the nature of knowledge in any coherent way.

The heuristics about “knowledge” used by John along with comments of mine on each one are provided below.

— Knowledge can only be volunteered, it can never be conscripted (You can’t make someone use or share knowledge if they don’t want to)

JMF: I think this means that you can’t force people to express what they know to other people, and while I agree that this can’t be done successfully, I’m not sure what this tells us about the nature of knowledge as distinct from information or other things that you can’t force people to give to others (e.g. love).

— We only know what we know when we need to know it (Knowledge is highly contextual and is recalled in context)

JMF: This one is also true, but it’s misleading because it leaves too much unsaid. First, we do only know what we know when we need to know it in the sense that we develop situational orientations to our concrete circumstances ay any point in our travels through space-time. Second, however, we not only recall “knowledge” in context, but we also create knowledge in context, so the “creating” must also be emphasized here in talking about our situational knowledge. Third, however, this suggests that knowledge is “mental” in character, but is not clear on what its biological elements are and says nothing explicit about knowledge expressions we create in situational contexts. And fourth, this heuristic tells us nothing about the notion of knowledge predispositions, i.e. tendencies toward developing knowledge orientations that exist in individuals and groups and that so important as pre-cursors of situational beliefs.

— We always know more then we can tell and we will always tell more than we can write down (Some things can only be known through experience)

JMF: This is one of Dave Snowden’s favorites and is based on Michael Polanyi’s work. This may be true, but it is also systematically ambiguous about the “knowledge” one is talking about, and therefore may be highly misleading, about the relative importance of “mental” versus other types of knowledge. First, what we “know” mentally is known in an entirely different way than what we “know” in the sense of written statements. What we mentally “know” is in the form of non-linguistic belief networks that are not fully understood by psychologists. What we know in the biological sense is in the form of physical networks that we are learning more about, but still don’t fully understand. And what we “know” in the sense of “cultural knowledge” is in linguistic form asserting linguistic content. Can we really say that “we know more than we can write down,” when we’re talking about different classes of ontological phenomena? How can we measure relative quantities in comparing our mental knowledge networks that orient us toward situations, and the things we write down that affect those networks?

Second, moreover, even if it is true that we know more than we can tell, and we can tell more than we can write down, is it not also true that we can write down more than we can ever know? That is, if I pose a non-tautological theory of minimal complexity, the Tarskian class of logical consequences of the theory, its logical content, will be infinite, and no human, however, knowledgeable about his/her own theory, will be able to fully understand this infinite logical content. Thus, Newton not only could write down much less than he knew, but he also wrote down far more than he could ever know. The same applies to Einstein, and to Darwin, the implications of whose theory far exceed anything he ever imagined, including evolutionary epistemology.

Third, these days, there is far too much mystification of our “mental” knowledge at the expense of our linguistic knowledge, and perhaps also at the expense of our biological knowledge. Michael Polanyi began the trend toward emphasizing mental and tacit knowledge in reaction to the modern focus in philosophy on linguistic knowledge and philosophy. This has been an important corrective to a too heavy emphasis on knowledge as a linguistic phenomenon. But now, perhaps, things are going the other way and we face a tendency to discount the importance of quality linguistic knowledge as part of our ecology of rationality. We see this in KM in the tendency to think that “tacit knowledge” is much more important than “explicit knowledge.” Actually both mental and linguistic forms of knowledge are very important and are in constant interaction. KM is, or should be, about both.

— If people need knowledge in the “context” of a real need it will always be shared

JMF: I think this one is largely the case if there is a shared felt need to solve a problem in a particular context. But I also think that it is too loosely stated since there can be a real need on the part of some people, while others who have the knowledge to fulfill that need do not or will not share because the need and the problem are not theirs. That is, even if they are aware of the context, they do not share it in the same way as those who are subject to the “real need.”

— “People don’t share knowledge in the anticipation that you need it” (“Asking people to store away knowledge on the basis of future needs”)

JMF: And I think this one may be over-stated in the other direction. I agree that the expectations of First Generation KM that people would share knowledge outside their work contexts and altruistically to boot were and are unrealistic. But we know too many instances of scientists and many others who create knowledge in anticipation of the needs of others, to be able to say that the above heuristic applies to any and all situations. It doesn’t. There are collegial peer situations in which people will share knowledge for the hell of it.

In characterizing the nature of knowledge, John also draws on the work of Shawn Callahan.

— “Types of tacit knowledge” (“Stuff people understand, but take for granted. Stuff nobody understands. Stuff that is hard to explain or articulate (even if you understand it).”)

JMF: I think that what Polanyi meant by “tacit knowledge: is something mental in character and that the notion of “ineffability” is heavily involved.. But I’m not sure how that fits with Shawn’s categories. Stuff people people understand and take for granted, may yet be expressed explicitly somewhere, so how is that necessarily “tacit.” And, if it’s not expressed explicitly somewhere, then how do we know what it is?

What about “stuff nobody understands?” What sense of “understand,” is at issue here? Is there any “tacit” knowledge that people really don’t “understand?” Can there be mental knowledge without “understanding,” even when it’s unconscious? If so, then what is “understanding?” Polanyi talks about the “ineffability” of tacit knowledge. But he did not mean by this that understanding was absent. Rather, we understand how to ride a bike even if we can’t articulate it. The surgeon, understands the patient’s anatomy, even though his understanding proceeds from intution and ineffability of thought and inference.

The category of stuff that is hard to explain or articulate even if we understand it, is part of what Polanyi meant in pointing to tacit knowledge. However, the part we can’t articulate is the tacit or ineffable part. The part we can is at most implicit knowledge that, with difficulty can be brought into the focal area of our gestalt fields and can be articulated and explained.

There are many other problems with this typology, as well, and many more than I can discuss here, however, the most important additional problem, is that the types of tacit knowledge typology leaves knowledge predispositions unaccounted for. It therefore fits into a conception of mental knowledge that recognizes the tacit and the explicit, but not the predispositional, an extraordinarily important element of our knowledge since it includes our attitudes and value orientations. I have an account of a much broader psychological framework that the tacit explicit framework than is generally used in KM, here.

— “Not outcomes based (more about learning)” (“elicit/nurture/hang-out/participate/cultivate”)

JMF: I have no issue with the importance of learning in generating knowledge, and I think that eliciting, nurturing, hanging out, participating, and cultivating, are all very important in making knowledge. In fact, the knowledge production aspect of the Knowledge Life Cycle framework is based on a selectionist learning theory. However, I don’t see either the advantage, or the basis in philosophy, or psychological theory, or in social psychology, or any other discipline for denying that learning has knowledge outcomes. Such formulations are a quest for novelty for its own sake. Processes have products. Learning is a word we use to describe process and activity; knowledge (of the mental variety) is one of the words we use to describe the outcome of learning; and attempts to remove knowledge as a product, from the process of learning are about as useful as attempts to remove adapted life forms from the process of evolution.

My next entry will get to John’s characterization of KM 2.0

To Be Continued

I’m sure everyone has seen the oft-repeated “fact” that 80% of the information we deal with is unstructured and that only 20% is structured data.

Seth Grimes of Alta Plana and Intelligent Enterprise has written an interesting article on this claim here.

It’s worth your time.

On March 17 and 18th John Tropea, one of the most active bloggers on KM 2.0 and social computing issues made two very interesting contributions to discussion of this issue. On March 17, in a blog entitled “Why KM 1.0 Failed in a Nutshell,” John put his finger on a point very essential to this whole debate, when he says the following and then quotes extensively from an interview with Ross Mayfield, the CEO of Socialtext.

“. . . this article has some of the best quotes on why KM 1.0 has failed.

 

This is explained so perfectly from the workers point of view…before you get into KM 2.0, if you want to begin to explain to someone what’s wrong with KM 1.0, these quotes will do the job:”

“The way organizations adapt, survive and be productive is through the social interaction that happens outside the lines that we draw by hierarchy, process and organizational structure. The first form of social software to really take off to facilitate these discussions was email.”

 

“Most employees don’t spend their time executing business process. That’s a myth. They spend most of their time handling exceptions to business process. That’s what they’re doing in their [e-mail] inbox for four hours a day. Email has become the great exception handler.”

 

“Unfortunately, what it means is all the learning disappears because it’s hidden away in people’s inbox. It’s not searchable and discoverable…”

“So at the edge of your organization, there are all kinds of exceptions that are happening. If you handle them appropriately, you can adapt to where the market is going. You can adapt to the problems you have in your existing structures.”

 

“…the greatest source of sustainable innovation is how you’re handling these exceptions to business process.”

Here John, and Ross Mayfield, too, put their collective fingers on the difference between operational business processing and knowledge processing in the three-tier model. “Exception handling” is “knowledge processing” and “creative learning” in that model. Ordinary business processing doesn’t involve creative or non-routine knowledge processing/learning. That gets done in exception handling.

John then adds to this quote by offering a statement of Mike Gotta’s” which underlines Mayfield’s point. What John doesn’t do here is to explicitly connect his title: “Why KM 1.0 Failed in a Nutshell,” to these quotes. So, we are left to infer the proposition that KM 1.0 failed because it didn’t deal with “exception handling,” creative learning, and non-routine knowledge processing. And to infer further that e-mail is the primary tool used for this purpose in the enterprise and that social computing software is now creating new capabilities for exception handling that never existed before and that forms the focus of KM 2.0.

There are other things one can infer from John’s entry also however. If one views things from my definition of KM as activity intended to enhance non-routine knowledge processing, implementing Web 2.0 software in the enterprise with the intent of supporting better “exception handling” (i.e. problem solving/knowledge processing) is KM activity. Whether it should be called KM 2.0 is another issue. But, that aside, the actual use of “2.0” tools is part of knowledge processing and problem solving. Further, if KM 1.0 really wasn’t about enhancing “exception handling” by implementing interventions that were intended to facilitate knowledge processing, then the problem with it wasn’t just that it failed in its intent to do KM, but, instead, was that it was never KM in the first place, because its thrust was to enhance routine business processing by enhancing information sharing, rather than to enhance “exception handling.”

Now, this is a pretty radical conclusion about KM efforts that used tools that weren’t of the “2.0” social computing variety, and I think, perhaps, that my projection of the implications of John’s view is probably overly harsh. Yet I think there are two points here worth making.

First, the partisans of KM 2.0 often describe KM 1.0 in an oversimplified way. Thus, it is doubtful whether there ever was a KM 1.0 in the way that writers such as Dave Pollard characterize it, except perhaps very early in the history of KM Best Practices systems. Certainly, such an image of KM hasn’t been dominant since well before Web 2.0 were first widely used a few years back. So, the image of KM 1.0 that is often contrasted with the new KM 2.0 is an idealized story about what KM 1.0 was about, designed to facilitate the image of KM 2.0 that its partisans are trying to convey. However, such a distortion of reality can be dangerous, just because its flawed view can lead to explanations of why older styles of KM failed that may be in error. Thus, John seems to be suggesting that older KM efforts failed because they were only about enhancing routine business processing rather than exception handling. But, if, in fact, many KM projects since the mid-90s have been concerned with enhancing problem solving, exception handling, and innovation, then a) it may be that quite a bit of KM intended to enhance knowledge processing may, in fact, have been going on before “KM 2.0,” and b) we may have to explain why these projects failed (when they did) in another way, which perhaps may not be so friendly to the idea that using “2.0” tools represents an entirely new departure for KM, that will work this time around.

But, second, having said the above, it is also true 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.

On March 18th, John added to his views in an entry called “Knowledge Management as an ecosystem.” This post talks about a presentation of John’s. It’s in the presentation that we really get John’s much more detailed view of KM 2.0. The presentation, also entitled “Knowledge Management as an ecosystem” begins with a discussion of current enterprise issues emphasizing rigidity, closedness and siloing, rigid tools, overuse of email, limited connectivity, and overload in communications. He then presents Mayfield’s views, and then explains that the enterprise issues are happening because KM hasn’t been fluid enough, people don’t participate enough in contributing their tacit knowledge, hierarchy, control, and micro-managing dominates decision making, and sharing feels like a task completely apart from one’s work. He then presents the view that the solution to these problems is a “conversation market” relying on “the wisdom of crowds,” self-organization, distributed knowledge production, autonomous flows, network effects, and emergence, and then moves on to outlining the characteristics associated with “the New KM,” as an ecological system. Here’s his list of ‘New KM” characteristics, interleaved with comments of mine on each of them.

JT: — Participation culture (Flatten participation barriers)

JMF: This is not a KM characteristic, but at best an outcome of an associated characteristic of organizational culture if the New KM is successful in its impact on knowledge processing and its enabling conditions

JT: — Social computing (participating, networking, initiated by the people (but they don’t call it KM))

JMF: This is is very loosely expressed, and is therefore deceptive in its implications. Participating and networking initiated by people is a) not necessarily computing, social or otherwise, b) an aspect of such participating and networking may be called social computing if its uses social computing tools, but what these are may be hard to distinguish, c) there’s no reason why anyone should call this KM since it is at best knowledge processing, provided that the participating and networking is about solving problems, and d) the widespread use of social computing doesn’t preclude KM. In fact, KM may be involved in enabling such computing at any time. If not today, then at some time in the future.

JT: — Knowledge Flow rather than manage (Publish/Subscribe model, Increase interactions (get knowledge moving), Communities/Networks, Come to me web, Contextual in time of need (just in time), Create “conditions” for knowledge rather than “manage”)

JMF: I agree that the general thrust of this is desirable, but its framing is deceptive. “Creating conditions for knowledge” is not, “not managing.” Unless the view of KM that is assumed is a “command-and-control” view. But I don’t know too many in KM (if any) who ever advocated or practiced that. Further “knowledge flow” is neither KM nor incompatible with it. So “knowledge flow” rather than “manage,” makes very little sense to me. I can see that KM ought be concerned with enhancing knowledge flow; but this certainly is not a special characteristic of any “New KM.”

JT: — Connect and Context vs Content and Collect (Knowledge/Findability via people (Trusted social filter), Emergence/Autonomy)

JMF: I guess I don’t see the “vs.” here. Nor do I see why this is not part of “knowledge processing” rather than “KM.” KM may be about enhancing these things. But they are not KM itself. Moreover, the importance of enhancing connectivity and context have been emphasized for many years in KM. Thoughts like these have been around for as long as I’ve been participating in “formal KM.” That is, since 1998. So, I don’t think this is any kind of “New KM” orientation.

JT: — Distributed (bottom-up) vs Command and Control (top-down) (Power of many vs a few (wisdom of crowds), Visibility and Opportunity (everyone is a potential innovator), Social Capital (a culture change in working))

JMF: I understand and agree with the idea that distributed knowledge processing produces more innovation and greater adaptability. But this is not KM. It is knowledge processing. Social capital development is also about enhancing the ways in which we process knowledge. KM is what we do to enhance distributed knowledge processing in human systems and to enhance the social capital we use in distributed knowledge processing (See Chapters 4, 6, 9 and 10 of Key Issues . . .)

JT: — Unstructured free-form tools (Easier to collaborate, Easier to get things done)

JMF: I agree that such tools enable “exception handling.” But, again, these are knowledge processing tools. KM may be involved in implementing their availability in organizations. But by themselves, they don’t involve KM activity uniquely.

JT: — “A way to work” rather than a task (Not trying to create a knowledge sharing culture, it just happens)

JMF: This one is a bit ambiguous. Is distributed knowledge processing “a new way to work?” Is “the New KM” “a new way to work?” Or both. I do agree that the development of a “knowledge sharing” culture follows enhanced KM and knowledge processing. “It just happens” as a result of effectiveness in these areas.

JT: — Sense-making (How do I make sense in the enterprise so I can act in it)

JMF: Sense-making is not KM. Knowledge Managers engage in sensemaking of course, and KM should enhance sensemaking, but better sensemaking is not part of a pattern that identifies “the New KM.” It is part of a pattern that identifies enhanced knowledge processing.

JT: — Aim Dave Snowden (Improve decision making, Conditions for innovation)

JMF: KM is for improved decision making. This has been one of its major value propositions from its beginning, i.e. enhanced knowledge capture and sharing were supposed to help decision making. Conditions for innovation were not a concern of First Generation Knowledge Management. But they’ve been a concern of Second Generation Knowledge Management since the 1990s.

In specifying his view of “the New KM” John doesn’t claim in the .ppt itself that “the New KM” and “KM 2.0” are one and the same. In fact, the .ppt implies that they are different, and states specifically, that “KM 2.0 is social computing.” Also, in using the term “the New KM”,” John doesn’t mention the previous use of the term. And I’d be remiss not to call attention to the frequent previous use of the term (10,500 hits on Google for “the New KM,” and 53.000 for “The New Knowledge Management.”)

My own use of the term, in “The New Knowledge Management: A Paradigm and its Problems” characterizes it as a paradigmatic approach to KM and says: “TNKM is a complex of epistemology, ontology, conceptual frameworks, methodological frameworks,methods, and a normative model called The Open Enterprise.” Altogether, my treatment of “the New KM,” written in 2003, employs 16 rather specific criteria to identify this paradigmatic approach to KM. Of course, neither my collaborator, Mark McElroy nor I have a monopoly on the use of this obvious term. But we have developed a very detailed view of the term, and I think that John might perhaps have noted our previous use and the way we had specified the idea.

His idea, above, is different, of course, and one might counter my various comments on it by pointing out that John intended to specify KM in the sense of an ecological system, whereas in my comments above, I seem to be thinking of KM as an activity or set of activities. All this is true. In previous writings I have referred to KM as an activity, a process of set of activities, a discipline or a paradigmatic approach to a discipline, but never to KM as an ecology. However. My response to such a reply is, that KM can never be an ecological system. This is not because there isn’t an ecology that enables to some degree or other knowledge processing in systems. On the contrary, there is such an ecology and if KM is about enhancing knowledge processing it should be centrally focused on making sure that the ecological system impacting knowledge processing is an “ecology of rationality,” rather than an ecology that undermines problem solving. But such an ecology is a normative vision for a state of the enterprise providing a high level of support for knowledge processing, that KM ought to aim at, rather than KM itself. In specifying the New KM, Marl McElroy and I have defined such a normative vision, and called it the Open Enterprise. It is not a KM system, but it is the vision of enterprise knowledge processing that we think that KM ought to aim at; and, incidentally, it has a number of commonalities with John’s “KM Ecological System.”

In my next blog, I’ll continue the discussion of John’s presentation, and will comment both on his treatment of “knowledge” and on his specification of “KM 2.0.”

To Be Continued

Oscar Berg, in a blog entry on February 24, 2008, writes about Andrew McAfee’s take on Enterprise 2.0 and its relationship to KM. He says:

“What strikes me about Andrew McAfee’s definition is that it is very technology-oriented. It does not say anything about the purpose and potential value of emergent social platforms for companies. However, Tom Davenport reports that Andrew McAfee said that “the ultimate value of E2.0 initiatives consists of greater responsiveness, better ‘knowledge capture and sharing,’ and more effective ‘collective intelligence’ at his talk at the FastForward conference in Orlando last week. Tom Davenport draws the conclusion that Andrew is in essence talking about knowledge management.

 

“I must admit to that KM and Enterprise 2.0 have their similarities when you look at what they ultimately aim to achieve. But does this mean Enterprise 2.0 simply is the next major version of KM? Should we in fact call it KM 2.0 instead? No, I don’t believe so. Sometimes you need to make a fresh start., to get rid of old definitions and conceptions and start over with a blank sheet to get things happening. . . . The term Enterprise 2.0 as defined by Andrew McAfee has provided us with that fresh start . . . . The term Enterprise 2.0 makes clear that we are leaving something and going someplace new and that it has to do with how enterprises are managed and operated. . . . Calling the place we are leaving Enterprise 1.0 instead gives us the opportunity and mandate to define what we are leaving from how we define the future. It is much more powerful and opens up for new perspectives and innovative thinking. . . .”

This makes clear the point of view that “Enterprise 2.0” is a broader notion than “KM 2.0,” but also that McAfee’s definition of E 2.0, doesn’t really define the idea in a way that goes beyond the IT area to the underlying more fundamental characteristics of the new form of enterprise suggested by the term “Enterprise 2.0.” Oscar goes on to indicate that he sees the introduction of E 2.0 tools as a way of changing attitudes and behaviors, but he doesn’t specify how these things would be changed in such a way that a characteristic “E 2.0” pattern going beyond IT changes would be defined and specified. That is, while calling for a broader E 2.0 than was specified by McAfee’s defintion, Oscar Berg doesn’t really define it in this post.

David Gurteen’s take on KM 2.0 appeared in Inside Knowledge Magazine on February 29. David approaches things from a historical perspective, viewing KM as initially technocentric, and frequently failing in the sense that people often didn’t see the value of KM systems designed to capture corporate information from them. Soon, some organizations began to emphasize what David calls soft tools in implementing KM. These included communities of practice, after action reviews, and peer assists, and amounts to people-centric KM focused on “informal learning, collaboration and inter-personal knowledge sharing.”

While the two forms of KM were being practiced, new web tools began to appear. These social tools, including blogs, wikis, social tagging, and others were low cost or shareware tools, focused on individual level applications. They became known as Web 2.0 tools, in contrast to Web 1.0 tools, because, together they seemed to enable the social web. As the tools moved into enterprise, people began to contrast Enterprise 1.0 and Enterprise 2.0 tools.

Enterprise 1.0 tools are associated with:

“traditional top down command and control, hierarchical organisation built around traditional centralised IT systems while Enterprise 2.0 is a flatter, more fluid networked organisation built around social tools.“

We see here an emphasis on the networked organization as a central idea of Enterprise 2.0. David Gurteen continues:

“ . . . KM managers and others are starting to see the power of social tools within organisations as personal KM tools. And a new view is emerging of KM 2.0 that maps many of the principals of Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 onto KM.”

This last passage suggests that there are clearly enunciated principles of Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0, but David Gurteen doesn’t spell them out here.

“Clearly though ‘2.0’ stuff does not replace ‘1.0’ stuff as the suffix might imply: traditional ‘1.0’ thinking and tools run hand-in-hand with ‘2.0 stuff.’ Organisations need both and they are co-evolving.”

This is a clear statement that 2.0 stuff builds on 1.0 stuff, a view that is far from explicit in other writing on this subject and often seems in conflict with it. For example, Dave Pollard’s view, seems much less friendly to 1.0 stuff. I think there is a split among writers in this area with some thinking that we should pronounce a plague on 1.0, while others see things as cumulative.

“But the key word in all of this is the word ‘social’. Another label for KM 2.0 might be ‘Social KM’. It is an emerging social model of KM that clearly places responsibility for knowledge sharing and making knowledge productive in the hands of the individual.”

The implication here is that earlier periods of KM did not place responsibility for sharing and reuse in the hands of individuals. But this view is debatable since KM has always been about trying to get individuals to share and reuse knowledge, and people-centric KM certainly was also social in its emphasis on communities and collaboration. The new development of KM practitioners becoming interested in using Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 tools in KM seems different from the old in that now the newly available tools better enable social networking and collaboration than the old tools did. That is, and over-simplifying considerably, at first KM was technocentric, then people-centric KM appeared, then social software appeared that better enables people-centric and inherently social KM. As David says, near the end of his admirably brief statement:

“And so in the world of KM 2.0 we have two categories of social tool – soft-tools such as after action reviews and knowledge cafes and techno-tools such as wikis and blogs – an incredibly powerful combination.”

Many other commentators mention social computing “techno-tools” as the focus of KM 2.0. but few remember that the “soft-tools” like knowledge cafes, communities of practice, and after action reviews have to be part of the KM 2.0 picture. In this, and in his emphasis on the cumulative nature of KM 2.0, I think David, is more careful in his outlook on KM 2.0, at least in this piece, than other commentators have been.

To Be Continued

On February 19, 2008, Tom Davenport, one of the most well-known names in KM, published a blog post entitled “Enterprise 2.0: The New, New Knowledge Management?” Before, I discuss this piece, full disclosure requires that I call attention to the fact that “The New Knowledge Management” is the “brand name” that my collaborator, Mark McElroy, and I gave to KMCI’s approach to Second Generation Knowledge Management a number of years back. So, perhaps, it’s to be expected that I might be critical of an opinion claiming that there is yet another “New Knowledge Management” out there. However, the expression “KM 2.0” is also a claim that there is a “New Knowledge Management,” as well as implicitly a claim that with every wave of new software tools there may well be another “New Knowledge Management,” so that we’re in for a KM 3.0, KM 4.0, KM 5.0, etc. as software technology advances. So, I may be very busy in the coming years evaluating whether the various changes in software tools really do signal the appearance of “New Knowledge Managements.” For now, however, I’ll get back to Tom’s entertaining post.

Tom begins by referring to a talk of Andy McAfee’s about which he says:

“. . . he talked about the need for trust, cultural change, for senior management leadership, and even for some “slack” within organizations. “OMG,” I thought. “He’s talking about knowledge management!”

Now for the life of me, I can’t see why such a statement wouldn’t evoke “change management,” “collaboration management,” or “innovation management,” rather than KM. However, Tom goes on to say:

“I have argued with Andy in several settings about the fact that Enterprise 2.0 isn’t as new or revolutionary as some would have it, and I had knowledge management in mind.

 

“Still, that E2.0 is the new KM didn’t hit me for a while. But when Andy said the ultimate value of E2.0 initiatives consists of greater responsiveness, better “knowledge capture and sharing,” and more effective “collective intelligence,” there wasn’t much doubt. When he talked about the need for a willingness to share and a helpful attitude, I remembered all the times over the past 15 years I’d heard that about KM. When he described the need for “lateralization” (by which I think he means simply the lateral flow of information), I wasn’t sure that a new word was necessary, because I’ve heard about the same topic in old words for many years.

 

“Sure, there are a few differences between classical KM and E2.0. The tools are largely different, for one. Perhaps the most important difference is the emphasis on emergence of content structures in E2.0, rather than specifying them in advance, as early knowledge managers had to. But I’ve always felt that most information environments require some mixture of structure and emergence. Andy’s comment that E2.0 requires “gardeners” suggests that he agrees.”

When we think about these comments of Tom’s, it’s useful to review Andrew McAfee’s definition of Enterprise 2.0 which is:

“Enterprise 2.0 is the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers.”

At the risk of being seen as “picking a nit,” I need to point out that according to this definition at least, “the use of” such platforms is not any kind of Management at all, but is really just employee activity using these new tools. Now, implementing emergent social software platforms in order to enable their use, may fall under the heading of “management,” but we can well ask why that is KM, rather than Information Management, Collaboration Management, Social Network Management, or some other form of Management other than Knowledge Management?

Of course, in previous discussions involving Andy and Tom, Andy had emphasized that, “the ultimate value of E2.0 initiatives consists of greater responsiveness, better ‘knowledge capture and sharing,’ and more effective ‘collective intelligence,’” and this can easily be interpreted as a claim that use of E2.0 software leads to enhanced knowledge processing in organizations, which is a basic rationale for KM. But even if this claim is true, it doesn’t equate E2.0 with KM, but rather claims that E2.0 causes or leads to enhanced knowledge processing, and further suggests that KM interventions implementing E 2.0 tools would prove effective in leading to enhanced knowledge processing.

I have no objection to a claim like this last one. E2.0 tools may well lead to enhanced knowledge capture and sharing, and also to increases in collective problem solving capability (which is what I mean by “collective intelligence”). However, does the probability that E2.0 tools, alone, or E2.0 tools combined with earlier generation tools (perhaps the more common situation) will enhance knowledge processing suggest that E2.0 is “The New, New Knowledge Management?” Forgive me, folks, but I don’t think so. Attempts to identify E2.0 and Knowledge Management whether new or not remind me of the claims that Enterprise Information Portals were KM’s “killer app” that appeared in 1999, just after the portal craze started. Those claims were based on two things: an expansive vision of portal software that was never successfully implemented by any software company, not because it couldn’t be, but because the venture capital gave out before a company could develop a real Enterprise Knowledge Portal, and an identification of KM with the software tools that are used in KM interventions.

The identification of E2.0, or Web 2.0. tools with a new generation of KM called KM 2.0, is not the first time that some commentators have tried to claim that advances in Information Technology define new ages or generations of KM. However, changes in KM that warrant us using the term KM 2.0, need, I think to be much more fundamental than mere changes in the IT tools that are at the disposal of KM practitioners. What I mean by more fundamental is that such changes are about the way one conceptualizes KM as a type of activity. Changes such as these occur relatively infrequently, and therefore movements from KM 1.0, to KM 2.0, to KM 3.0 and so on would also occur rarely, as befits a field that aspires to be a discipline rather than a fad.

In other words, it is appropriate and understandable for software tools to move from versions 1.0, to 2.0 to 3.0 and so on in a very few years; but KM is not a software tool; it is a management discipline, and thus there cannot be a “new” version of it every few years, even though many aspects of it may change frequently, as is appropriate for a dynamic, quickly changing field.

One reason why it’s possible and popular to advance the idea that there is a KM 2.0 that is Enterprise 2.0, or that is Web 2.0, is because many who are advancing it, haven’t given a lot of attention to conceptualizing KM and don’t have a clear idea of what it is. In other posts we’ve seen the tendency to conflate both KM and knowledge processing with Information Management. Collaboration, and Content Management. In addition, in previous posts in this series, we’ve seen the frequent conflation of KM and knowledge processing. We’ve even seen it in Tom Davenport’s blog, as I’ve pointed out above. And we can see it in other work of Tom’s such as his otherwise great article with John Glaser on the Partners Healthcare case.

Identifying these two different things, makes it more sensible to contend that when the tools of knowledge processing change, we also have new versions of KM. It’s harder to draw such a conclusion when we have clear definitions of KM that we apply consistently, however. In my previous work, including many of the blogs here, I’ve defined KM as activity intended to enhance knowledge processing; and I’ve also said that knowledge processing includes, problem seeking, recognition, and formulation, knowledge production, and knowledge integration. In addition, I’ve explained the Three-tier Model as specifying the context of KM.

Applying these notions here, one can see that there has been only one fundamental change in KM since its beginnings as an explicit field of study and management in the late 1980s. That change occurred when KM’s original emphasis on sharing, reusing, finding, and capturing knowledge as the activities knowledge managers were trying to enhance, was supplemented by the addition of problem seeking, recognition, and formulation, and knowledge production (creation, discovery, and making) activities, as targets for KM activity. That change occurred in the period 1995 – about 2002 or so. It was a gradual change, but today, if pressed, I think the majority of KM practitioners would agree that this new area of concern, “the demand side” of knowledge processing, is, in addition, to knowledge sharing, a primary target of Knowledge Management, as a discipline. This change defines the Second Generation of KM, the real KM 2.0.

In other words, I am suggesting that the change from KM 1.0 to KM 2.0 is not occurring now as a result of the introduction of E2.0 new tools, but has occurred both in the past, and some time ago, as a result of the realization that KM had more concerns than just knowledge sharing, knowledge capture, and knowledge re-use, and that, in fact, it was also, and in equal part, about learning within complex systems. The changes being introduced by “Enterprise 2.0” are no doubt positive for KM and they provide other useful tools for the KM tool box. But by themselves they may well not produce good or more successful KM, or even enhanced knowledge processing. Enhanced knowledge processing may not be a product of enhancements in collaboration, content management, and social connectedness alone. Such enhancements can have negative effects as well as positive ones. They may stimulate excessive communitarianism, and the destruction of dissenting points of view and new ideas in the enterprise. Then, again, they may not.

My point here is, that the simple correlation of enhancements in social networking with enhancements in the quality of knowledge processing is not something that can be guaranteed. It is not supported by scientific research. It is not supported by good theory. And it is not suggested by the idea that KM is about enhancing knowledge processing. So even if E2.0 can guarantee complete success in enhancing collaboration, content management, and social networking, this would not establish the inevitability of improvements in knowledge processing and the quality of knowledge.

And even if we view it as guaranteeing better “sharing,” ”collaboration,” “content management, E2.0 in itself would still carry with it no way of telling whether we are sharing information or knowledge, or whether we are sharing what will work for us, or just sharing our errors. So, the connection between E2.0 and better KM is, in my view, no closer than the connection between it and other older tools such as portals, content management software, search technology, and databases. All such tools can be useful in KM, as can KM 2.0 tools. Undoubtedly Enterprise 3.0 will add still more tools that can help us in KM and also undoubtedly, there will be many more generations of software improvements after that. But no new generation of software tools IS KM, or a new form of KM. We cannot declare a new generation of KM every time we have software changes. This is just a category error, and we need to stop making it, or we in KM will end up as an entirely conceptually confused appendage of the software industry and its marketers.

To Be Continued

At the same time Bill Ives offered his blog, Doug Cornelius began a series of blogs on “Law Firm Knowledge Management 2.0.” Cornelius defines Law Firm Knowledge Management 2.0 as: “Law firm knowledge management 2.0 is about incorporating Web 2.0 / Enterprise 2.0 technologies and processes into the law firm knowledge management toolkit.” And he poses the question:

“(a) enterprise 2.0 is a subset of knowledge management (b) knowledge management is a subset of enterprise 2.0 (c) knowledge management is the same thing as enterprise 2.0 (d) knowledge management has nothing to do with enterprise 2.0?”

 

He doesn’t quite answer the question he poses, however. Instead he says:

“I have come to the conclusion that enterprise 2.0 and knowledge management are two disciplines that need to join together.”

 

And he says further:

“Incorporating enterprise 2.0 technologies into the knowledge management toolbox, gives people easy to use – easy to learn tools. It allows them to capture and organize their information in a way that works for them. The focus of knowledge management should be on the individual, by giving them tools for personal use, the content of which can leveraged by the rest of the enterprise. Knowledge management is trying to get people who do similar things communicating with each other and collaborating. Then capture that collaboration for their own re-use and re-use across the enterprise. That sounds like what the enterprise 2.0 movement is about.”

 

This view of Cornelius’s makes a vague kind of sense, but it relates collaboration, communication, content, and a greater capability for individuals to organize information which can be more easily aggregated to the organization level. The mystery however, is what this all has to do with knowledge processing and KM. Certainly the statement above doesn’t make the connection between enhanced collaboration, communication, content, etc. and Knowledge Management except to assert that KM “is trying to get people who do similar things communicating with each other and collaborating.” However, it’s hard to see why it is not just Collaboration Management, rather than Knowledge Management.

In addition to these general views on the subject, Cornelius included specific ideas relating various Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 tools to KM 2.0. Wikis remove the technological barrier in capturing content, but they require attorneys to synthesize that content in wiki pages. The synthesis is an advantage over an e-mail approach. The stream of edits may be pushed out to subscribers, and may be easily searched and and results retrieved, The wiki can act as a simple content manager. But it can also engage subscribers in conversations.

RSS feeds are viewed as a tool that makes wikis more powerful. They disaggregate content from source. One can see new content without going back to a web site, and also see the flow of information rather than just static content. “RSS turns a webpage from a repository of information into a broadcaster of information.”

Cornelius sees blogs, wikis, and RSS feeds as the three most important Enterprise 2.0 technologies. Blogs are easily publishable html web pages, providing the ability to quickly capture knowledge and publish it, and making it available for others to find and search. Law firm administrators can use them “to make the law firm community aware of new information, policies and happenings.” Others can participate in blogs by adding comments. So, blog posts and comments are captured elements of collaboration and communication.

In his blog series Cornelius also comments on how wikis, blogs, and RSS feeds can combine with earlier technology tools (presumably KM 1.0 tools) to produce enhancements in knowledge sharing. Thus, Document Management systems produce repositories in which it is hard to find information and content one is looking for. But wikis and blogs can “identify and highlight the better content in the document management system,” and this can enhance search within these repositories. Going further, blogs, wikis, and RSS feeds can provide people with a more organized, searchable and sharable form of communication than e-mail, whose use needs to be reduced in Law firms. Also, there are problems associated with enterprise search. These include accessibility, searchability, and findability. A key problem associated with these is the idea of doing one search across all sources – the idea of federated search (though Cornelius doesn’t use this last term). However, even though this problem is raised, no explanation is given of how blogs, wikis, RSS feeds or other “KM 2.0” tools can help with enterprise search.

The series on “Law Firm Knowledge Management 2.0” ends with a summary post. One statement in the post clarifies very well Doug Cornelius’s idea of KM.

“These are just technology tools. At its core knowledge management is about collaboration and sharing. Different people and different groups communicate and collaborate in different ways. As a knowledge management professional, I focus on bringing people together to communicate and collaborate. I want to give them tools to make it easier for them to communicate and collaborate.”

He sees Web 2.0 tools as enhancing communication, collaboration, and sharing and that’s why he talks about “KM 2.0.” This makes clear a positive aspect of his point of view. That is, he’s quite aware that KM 2.0 is not just the new software tools. Rather, he views it as getting people to collaborate, communicate, and share through the use of a combination of old and new tools. But my question is: why is this KM 2.0, rather than Collaboration Management 2.0? What’s the difference between these two fields? Why is there no attempt in his treatment of KM 2.0 to distinguish between information and knowledge, or information sharing and knowledge sharing? And why, finally, is there no attempt to distinguish between the acts of collaboration, communication, and sharing, and Knowledge Management itself? Cornelius’s series is another example of the conceptual blurring of key distinctions we find in much writing about KM. At the beginning of his series, Doug Cornelius posed the questions:

“(a) enterprise 2.0 is a subset of knowledge management (b) knowledge management is a subset of enterprise 2.0 (c) knowledge management is the same thing as enterprise 2.0 (d) knowledge management has nothing to do with enterprise 2.0?”

And as I said earlier, he never answered these questions. We can now see some reasons why. First he has no clear ideas about the differences between content, information, and knowledge. Second, he has no clear idea about the differences between Information Management, Content Management, Collaboration Management, and Knowledge Management. Without such distinctions, however, how can one analyze the relationship between Enterprise 2.0 and KM 2.0, since Enterprise 2.0 is clearly a much broader concept and must include all of these types of management, and still other types, in addition to Knowledge Management?

To Be Continued

Well, we’ve finally arrived at 2008, certainly the most active year thus far in the KM 2.0 boom. I don’t know whether this is the Year of KM 2.0, since perhaps we’re still not at the peak of debate and discussion over the idea. But 2008 has certainly increased the frequency and intensity of discussion to a new level.

On January 22, Mike Gotta posted a blog on the importance of social software relating it to KM. Among other things he said:

“The benefits gained from galvanizing the creativity and know-how of people is not a revolutionary concept. Knowledge management strategies over the past decade have long sought to improve communication, information sharing, and collaboration across information and knowledge workers. . . .”

“There is a paradoxical nature to participation that should be recognized when discussed in the context of social software. It is obvious that after decades of people using content management and collaboration systems there is ample evidence that people participate and contribute through these tools and the applications constructed using these tools. Yet the exuberance associated with social software, often under the guise of Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0, is driven by the argument that only certain tools (e.g., blogs, wikis, tags/bookmarks, social network sites) support the “architecture of participation” concept put forth by Tim O’Reilly. If people already have tools at their disposal to participate and contribute, why do they need different tools to participate and contribute? It seems contradictory on many levels.

“To unravel this enigma, it is helpful to divide participation into actions and contributions that are “directed” versus those that are “volunteered . . . “

 

Mike Gotta then offers four basic participation models: process, activities, communities and networks and points out that the first two involve primarily directed and task-oriented participation, while the last two involve voluntary participation. He then makes his central point:

“It’s not the case that organizations perceive that they need social software to dramatically improve the quantity and quality of participation that is directed. The real objective is to catalyze voluntary participation and contributions across all work categories to improve communication, information sharing and collaboration. Many different social software tools can be used to support functional applications that direct some level of participation and user contributions. What excites strategist are social applications that catalyze volunteered participation and user contributions – a long-standing objective of knowledge management and human capital management strategies for decades.”

 

It’s clear from the above that Mike Gotta views KM as directed toward improving communication, information sharing, and collaboration, and sees catalyzing “volunteered participation and user contributions” as one of its longstanding objectives for decades. While there may be some case to be made that the above are among things that Knowledge Managers aim at, it seems doubtful that these are the central purposes or objectives of KM. Again, in this post, we see a tendency on the part of supporters of social software and its use in KM, to associate KM with collaboration and communication rather than directly with enhanced knowledge processing. The argument has the form: KM is about enhancing collaboration and communication, social software does that for us. Thus, social software represents a new direction in KM.

A blog by Bill Ives on January 28, entitled “Top articles of 2007 for McKinsey & Web 2.0 and one prediction for 2008” provides a slightly different perspective on Web 2.0 and enterprise 2.0 tools. It asserts:

“another major emerging use is the application of web 2.0 principles to workflow applications. There is a new breed of web 2.0 or enterprise 2.0 tools that go beyond blogs and wikis to create workflow applications that incorporate this new transparency. Many of these have been covered in this blog. The transparency these tools offer allows for better team work AND a searchable, archived window into what the organization is doing for all who need to know, should know, and can benefit from this knowledge.

 

“Now, when I say workflow or work process I do not mean the static inflexible workflow of old style content management or project management tools. The advantage of these new tools is that they allow work processes that are more organic and dynamic. They allow the users to control the workflow or process, build it up from tasks and make changes as needed. And, to repeat, they allow for transparency and archiving, and thus KM, to be a byproduct of work, rather than an added requirement. If they are smart at McKinsey this will be a feature for one of their articles or studies in 2008.”

 

I think this emphasis on increased transparency resulting from Web 2.0 tools, and also on their significance for creating more dynamic and organic workflow is very well-taken, but I must admit I don’t understand his notion that “they allow for transparency and archiving, and thus KM, to be a byproduct of work, rather than an added requirement.” I suspect that what Bill Ives means is that greater transparency and archiving contribute to enhanced knowledge processing that is integrated better into everyday workflow. But KM and knowledge processing are two different things, and I don’t think there is anything about Web 2.0 that makes KM “a byproduct” of Web 2.0 enabled work. Also, even though some aspects of knowledge processing may well be enhanced by Web 2.0 tools, which aspects are enhanced, which are not, and in what ways, needs to be analyzed in far more detail.

The arguments of Mike Gotta and Bill Ives were commented on favorably by John Tropea in a blog on January 29th. And he added the following important comments expanding on the points made by both:

“Traditional KM tools indeed don’t allow people the freedom to share and connect, creating their own ecosystem…the design simply isn’t geared towards this at all. They are great to streamline work processes, but what about stuff you learn along the way, stuff you don’t anticipate…the tools aren’t designed for what life brings to the table as they are not organic enough. I agree KM 1.0 tools are great to automate, and make things efficient, but they lack flexibility, and when it comes to extracting tacit knowledge, they are just not designed to how humans work…with KM 2.0 we now have tools that are not designed for a specific task, instead they are more open ended tools, that can be used and mashed up for any use case, and most importantly a way to instantly publish personal information and findings.

 

“What knowledge sharing or sensemaking should be about it not an explicit task “you must share knowledge”, it is more simply the way you do work. You are documenting or publishing snippets of stuff you do in your normal day, it’s how you get things done…it’s not a thing in itself, it’s just part of your regular process of doing work.

 

“This in turn becomes sharing knowledge, as others can tap into your daily flow and benefit…and indeed sometimes you may explicitly publish and push knowledge onto certain people, as you know what you have mused is relevant and can be applied right now.”

 

I think some of the assumptions in the background of this statement, especially those concerning “KM 1.0” are a bit questionable. Basically, the position being taken is that KM 1.0 tools were always about facilitating explicit tasks that could be automated and that are tied to directed work, whereas “KM 2.0” tools facilitate work that is more-open-ended and flexible and “organic.” I don’t think this assumption is correct. For example, tools for supporting communities of practice pre-dated “KM 2.0” tools. So did portals. So did search tools. All are tools that are open-ended and not designed for specific tasks. No doubt, “KM 2.0” tools are easier to use and less expensive than these earlier tools. They are also implementable on a non-centralized and distributed basis, and this makes them much more suitable for enhancing self-organization in the enterprise and for “creating their own ecosystem.”

However, even though the freedom to share and connect, and the open-endedness and flexibility of “KM 2.0” tools certainly provide new possibilities for KM to enhance knowledge processing in organizations, the conclusions that these tools enhance collaboration, communication, self-organization, and content management, don’t imply that using them in KM interventions will enhance knowledge processing in organizations. This comment may seem puzzling, in light of the notion that the above enhancements would certainly improve capture, sharing, and broadcasting. The problem, however, is what the tools contribute to distinguishing knowledge from information and the various aspects of problem solving. Without explicit reasoning showing that “KM 2.0” tools can enhance functioning in these areas, we cannot say whether these tools are really KM 2.0 tools, or just Information Management Tools, and we cannot tell whether they facilitate knowledge sharing or information sharing. This point should suggest one of the central problems of the whole KM 2.0 movement, namely that, like the old, First Generation Knowledge Management, it has no way of distinguishing knowledge from information, or Knowledge Management from Information Management. In that sense, it is not a step forward for KM, even given its increased technical sophistication and more human-compatible tools, but rather is a step backward into the conceptual vagueness and ambiguity of the KM of the 1990s.

To Be Continued