Freitag, 4. Februar 2011

Knowledge Management is dead

Knowledge Management is dead, thank god. And I would not have given it a thought and it would have rested in peace, if I hadn't come across a blog post, where they have finally caught the murderer. Social Media vs Knowledge Management: A generational war, and Knowledge Management was among the casulties, it was outlived by the younger generation.




Let's park the discrepancy in quality of the two terms, and follow a bit more the elaboration as it is outlined in the post.
Knowledge Management is so old-fashioned, that it had died of age anyway, it is just that Social Media accelerated the process. Knowledge Management with all the dusty concepts and terms: Knowledge Cafes, pre-defined Ontologies, Subject Matter Experts, Mailing Lists, Communities of Practice with Community Leaders and Community Specifications. And even the Knowledge Manager.
You know the discussion: When will we finally have reached the maturity in Knowledge Management that the role of the Knowledge Manager is superflous?
So here is the good news to all managers, who painfully let go some utilization for rusty KM efforts and even a specific role: Knowledge Management is dead.
Peter Drucker's term Knowledge Worker bears already more than half a century on a bent back, and Knowledge Management was branded in the early 1990's. 
The idea was simple: Knowledge is an asset (and in many industries the most important one), and assets shall be managed to create optimal value for the company.
And the idea came with its manifestations. As we all know, just an idea is not creating any value, it must be turned into business (this is what I call "manifestations" - the philosophers among you know the distinction and are very welcome to provide the classic terminology). The manifestations were state of the art of the 1990's: Mailing Lists, predefined ontologies, etc. (see the listing above).
Thank god, we have buried the Knowledge Management manifestations of the 1990's, RIP. This, the manifestation of Knowledge Management of the 1990's, is what sloppy has been named Knowledge Management, because Social Media is a much hipper buzz than calling it Knowledge Management manifestations 2010.
However if you look at the idea of Knowledge Management, is has become even more important nowadays (now you also understand why I get shivers, when people confuse Knowledge Sharing with Knowledge Management). The management of knowledge and building business around it, has become the decisive race towards success (see Networked entreprise is leading into the future).
Only the manifestations, the ways of working, the tools, the media have changed. Now it is called Social Media, but I bet my fantastic salary that in 2020 there will another buzz. Because the idea of Knowledge Management is not about implementing about a specific tool, it is about gaining a relative competitive advantage, it is about striving one step beyond what everybody does and knows. Like with the managers, who have changed names, but are nevertheless expected to manage the business, the Knowledge Managers support to manage the knowledge, but not doing the same things as a decade ago. Today's challenges are around creating value out of Collaboration, out of Web2.0 opportunities and out of Social Networking, managing the knowledge in a better way.
So please join me in saying:
Knowledge Management is dead, long live Knowledge Management!

regards
gerald

ps: this post is not a fair summary of the above mentioned blog post! It is well worth reading.

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