New Agora

In my previous post on justifying KM through demonstrating reduced rates of critical failure, James Grey wrote:

in the current financial circumstances, I think a horizon of 5 years is way too far in the future to consider. We are looking at how we can apply current knowledge quickly to realise business benefits ... looking for [knowledge] gaps and how to fill them. By doing this you can quickly realise benefits for the organisation based on cash saved or generated rather than claiming you prevented something that [might] or might not have happened in the future.

Applying current knowledge to realise business benefits is a useful and valuable activity, of course.

However, there are dangers in this approach when trying to justify KM:

• Filling knowledge gaps will only repair existing organisational structures, which means essentially taking a "low hanging fruit" approach that will probably never locate or fix the deeper flaws in an organisation that make critical failure more likely.
• Using Firestone and McElroy's 3-tier model of KM, this kind of activity is probably better described as Knowledge Processing (KP). That is, a strategy for working with knowledge and discovering or sharing it to enhance business processes, rather than a program to enhance how people think about generating knowledge themselves and/or solving problems.
• There is a legitimate concern among some executives that KP, on its own, looks very similar to "regular" management -- and sometimes to a question about the real value proposition of KM.
• Even if the approach James advocates could be classed as top-tier KM through the targeting of KP activities in the organisation, it comprises a scattergun approach to KM rather than a consistent, ongoing program for improving KP. This approach is also particularly susceptible to staff turnover -- generally once the long-suffering KM advocate leaves the company, most or all KP-improvement-related activities stop as well.

It boils down to the give-a-man-a-fish vs teach-him-to-fish argument. If a KM person just runs around trying to fix knowledge gaps, they are not educating managers in how to think about things so that this problem doesn't occur, or can be fixed.

On the other hand, if all managers were trained in how to avoid knowledge gaps, the potential benefits to the business are far greater -- but the benefits are deferred and won't be directly attributable to the Knowledge Manager. And so we return to the idea of measuring success through the reduction of critical knowledge failures.