Is Knowledge Management (KM) dying? Was it just a fleeting fad? I had to pause for a second when I read Dave Pollard’s Knowledge Management: Finding Quick Wins and Long Term Value because I hadn’t read anything about KM in quite a while.
It was a buzz word for many years that hasn’t generated much buzz as of late. I’ve not heard a client nor any conference attendee nor read anyone posting a question to this blog or e-mail me anything on the subject in at least 18 months. A quick search on Google News finds only a handful of stories in the past week. But one such tidbit caught my eye and perhaps provides a hint that KM is heating-up again: According to Bain & Company's Management Tools & Trends 2007 study, KM, for the first time, ranks among the top-10 "most used" tools.
For the record, the top 10 tools cited by executives (a survey of 1200 executives from around the World):
- Strategic planning
- Customer relationship management
- Customer segmentation
- Benchmarking
- Core competencies
- Outsourcing
- Knowledge management
- Business process reengineering (tied for 8th)
- Scenario & contingency planning (tied for 8th)
For those keeping score, KM isn’t just a tool though. In fact, it’s not a tool at all. KM is a business discipline built around people and process, and supported by technology. And there are many tools in the field of KM (see The lost meaning of knowledge management, written almost a year ago to the day, for a full definition and overview of KM).
However, viewed as a tool in the context that Bain uses, KM is increasingly important. Not surprisingly though is this telling statistic: in the top 25 most used tools, KM is the least satisfactory off all the tools (save for RFID which narrowly beat out KM for least satisfactory). In other words, the biggest gap between importance and satisfaction is awarded to KM.
In short, effective KM requires cultural adoption and change management with strong, well defined practices for sharing knowledge, and multiple supporting technologies (including intranet, document management, collaborative tools, etc.).
In Knowledge Management: Finding Quick Wins and Long Term Value Dave Pollard offers up six quick wins for KM:
- Create focused, managed directories of acknowledge experts in subjects that matter to a lot of people in your organization.
- Provide employees with a desktop search tool and show them how to use it effectively.
- Provide 'cheat sheets' to users that show how to organize (and name) documents on your hard drive and messages in e-mail folders.
- Use RSS and encourage people to publish their information on blogs.
- Create a template for requesting information that is needed in a hurry where the requestor isn't sure who to ask for it (via e-mail, IM or other routing system).
- Teach people how to do research, not just search: This skill isn't just for information professionals.
Clearly KM is important – and very important to executives. And yet intranet managers don’t seem to be doing much about it…
(Just an interesting side note from the study: 30% of companies use blogs, with a satisfaction rate of 3.39 out of 5.)
