KM Learnings

And I’ve got miles to go, before I sleep. Indeed. Sigh.

There’s so much to read and so little time. Time does fly.

Anyways, it doesn’t prevent me from collecting more articles and putting them in a folder called “Read or die”.

Chuckle. Nothing. Just wondering why I am not dead yet! :D

The good thing is that out of the N number of articles I save for later, there are a few that I do skim through immediately. Here’s one such nice article I discovered and went through immediately.

Ten Things I've Learned about Knowledge Management by Bruce Karney

Bruce is a KM veteran and was with HP for many years before becoming an entrepreneur.

A few things from his list that made me nod in acknowledgement (based on experience) were:

Ø As Thomas Stewart wrote in his book The Wealth of Knowledge, connection, not collection, is the essence of knowledge management. (To which I’d like to add – Collection based connection is perhaps even better)

Ø Face to face knowledge sharing is not a luxury. The pity is that in many organizations it is perceived as being one. There are indeed examples of effective knowledge sharing in the absence of face to face, but these are far outnumbered by examples of ineffective computer-based and phone-based collaboration.

Ø Communities of Passion are what businesses should be trying to create and sustain, not Communities of Practice. When there is no passion, communities are unlikely to produce useful results.

Ø Search is the killer app of document-centric KM, and Google sets the standard.

Some things that I probably have come across before but which made me think again were:

Ø The word knowledge is misused often. If you replace knowledge with experience and the sentence sounds wrong, you're talking about information, not knowledge.

Ø It's easier and more effective to manage ignorance, by eliminating it, than to manage knowledge. Humans' natural ability to notice exceptions and aberrations makes it easier for us to eliminate what we don't want (e.g., smallpox, garbage, air pollution) than to manage, sort, and organize what we do want and have plenty of (e.g., knowledge).

Ø For all the money that many organizations spend on information technology for KM, they often have no more ability to effect change than the leader of a Yahoo! Group has for free.