dave: i presume you meant six sigma instead of six stigma!

** It as deliberate. I first heard the slip from Gary Klein and have shamelessly copied it ever since. It sort of works for me. Dave

Fantastic summary of the state of the notion Dave - have blogged this post at www.greenchameleon.com. Thanks!

Well said. I like the argument about making tacit explicit. I will make sure I post this to my blog.

Like the SECI paradigm, the question "Is KM dead?" could be said to address the container, rather than the thing contained - the wagon, but not the band. Could we say that KM qua "thing contained" is the stream of proven methods, tools and practices, all with a bearing on those two objectives pointed out in Dave's second paragraph? To me, those entities seem more alive than ever, not solely the objectives.

The alleged "death of KM" remains an interesting proposition, albeit mainly in a meta-perspective: has the acronym exhausted its power to create attention, urgency and funding for initiatives?

I don't think this contradicts your thoughts above, Dave. Perhaps you implicitly say a similar thing. But I do think the general discussion of "the death of KM" somtimes comes unproductively close to making the Rylean category mistake.

Congratulations Dave. You've managed to write an excellent review of the state of affairs WITHOUT offending anyone in particular. That's great.

Congratulations Dave. You've managed to write an excellent review of the state of affairs WITHOUT offending anyone in particular. That's great.

Dave,

Love the posting. An overfascincation with technology has weakened many areas of knowledge. Goverment intelligence agencies are at the top of my list of institutions that have way more data/information than they used to have and a lot less knowledge. Here are a few thoughts contained in the conclusions from the book on national security intelligence that I will take to the publisher tomorrow. You may recognize some of your handiwork here.
------

16.15 Digital and Analogue

Ultimately, computers are binary decision makers. It is a zero or it is a one. That is all a computer can do at the most basic task level. All tasks for computers must be broken down into the simplest of steps or it cannot function. Therefore, digitalization is by its nature a reductionist practice. But the complexities of the emergent order problems of the future are not capable of being broken down into smaller parts for analysis. When this is done, the process of reductionism loses the essence of the problem at end.

We are frequently trapped into the idea that computers can somehow solve difficult problems. While this is true for tasks such as accounting or for processes such as categorization, it is not true when attempting to deal with complex ideas such as social resilience or the threats to the economy from a SARS type incident.

We need to quit worshiping at the temple of digitalization. It reduces us and makes us smaller – just like the way binary models make decisions. The power of understanding complexity, uncertainty and abstraction will be a leadership tool and survival mechanism in the future - or it may be a tool of domination. To lose the power to think and be reduced to a binary model is destructive.

Ultimately, the intelligence officers of the future will have to be intelligent.

Hi Dave ! What a fantastic weblog post, indeed ! I have thoroughly enjoyed it and have commented on it in my own weblog as well. If anyone ever would want to know a little bit of the history of KM on how it got started, where it went and where it is going now, this is certainly the weblog post to recommend. Thanks for putting it together and for sharing it with us, and, like I said, for re-igniting that passion once again!

Thank you Dave, beautifully crafted posting, offering clarity and recognition for the 'human side' of knowledge aquisition and development.

For learning practitioners like myself a chance to be recognised as 'players in the game'.

I am sharing your posting with all my new HRM students on a Post Grad masters programme in order for them to understand and debate:

Where did KM come from?
Where is it now?
What role do HRM & HRD professionals play in the emerging areas of sense-making and social software development?

If we are lucky we will develop a new cadre of HR professionals who are able to work alongside CIOs, Librarians and the organisation in a more holistic and effective way making sense of what an organisation knows and how to use it.

Is KM dead? Have we found better ways to support effective decision making? Maybe there are better ways to create the conditions for innovation, but to me the potential for using KM to create better understanding of complex social problems, as well as better support for innovative solutions, is just in its beginning.

I'm not a PhD in KM or some big corporate IT person. I lead a small non profit (http://www.tutormentorconnection.org) that sees value of using knowledge libraries and IT tools to help create a better understanding of poverty, and a better distribution of solutions in all of the places where poverty is the root cause of many local and global tragedits.

I hope KM is not dead yet. I'm still looking for volunteers with these skills to help me make life better for thousands of disadvantaged. kids.

Thanks for posting Dan. I spent a bit of time on your web site which looks to be in its early stages. I found some useful stuff, got frustrated at some of the web links that didn't work but could see the potential. Ie. it seems to me that what you have there is the potential for a place for people to share information and to connect to resources and to each other. I think that sort of thing will continue, and it may or may not be called Knowledge Management. I don't think that anything I said argued against the value of such site and I would reference you to my last paragraph.

That said, I am worried that a lot of government and not-for-profit organisations (with or without PhDs) are making similar mistakes to those made in large corporations over the last decade. They are focusing on documents, and top down communication, not making enough use of social computing (blogs, wikkis etc) and taking a structured push model to information processing.

Hopefully as your community grows their contributions will became the main source of content and its use will spread. You have my best wishes in that endeavor. Knowledge Libraries and the use of IT tools can I think contribute to finding solutions to issues such as poverty. Along with self-organising capability development, such as the Grameen Bank I think they are of vital importance. Technology as a supportive tool, augmenting human decision making is a good thing. As an attempt to structure, codify and control information flow then it has failed, and will fail in any organisation no matter what its nature.

Maybe the fad and novelty of KM has run its course (I can’t say for sure since I don’t follow the field too closely --I just never understood what KM was supposed to be). After reading your article, I am now thinking that KM should be made to be less of an academic discipline, or a top-down BPR management program, and rather be made into set of skills anyone could (and should) learn. Call it the “Liberalization of Knowledge Management?” I wonder what would happen in an organization if more people cared, passionately, to operate with those objectives of KM you mentioned, “To support effective decision making” and “To create the conditions for innovation”. In that sense, no one would be a “Knowledge Management Practitioner” or a KM Specialist, even a CKO, certified or not; instead, every person should practice knowledge management in their work (whatever their field). I see myself trying to do just those things, supporting effective decision making and encouraging others to be innovative, but I don’t call it knowledge management (but, now, I think I could).

I especially like your statement that “(w)hen people ask me where they should get a qualification in KM, I said don’t, do some philosophy, anthropology, cognitive science at under graduate level…” I can't agree more, especially the study of anthropology. I learned more about how to deal with bureaucracies and cultures at my work from reading about the potlatches of Pacific Northwest Indians than I ever have from reading the Harvard Business Review!

I must admit to feeling a pang of disappointment with this post. To me it is almost an admission that all of the things we've said about KM has been a sham, that even as a construct it can be made explicit and therefore 'die' in the traditional sense that fads eventually fade away.

But wasn't Dave one of those who said that knowledge only becomes knowledge when it is needed? How then can KM, even in a rhetorical sense, possibly die away? Knowledge will always be needed, just as understanding how that knowledge evolves, emerges and is shared will always be a source of endless fascination to those who seek enlightment about the world and its wonders.

KM appeared several years ago with the message that it had always been with us but just not acknowledged as an essential platform upon which all progress has evolved. And as long as there is free thought and continuous questionning it will always be a critical part of human growth. So, just because the 'fad' elements of KM appear to be weakening doesn't mean that as a philosophy it will ever leave us.

Well if the things "we" said about knowledge management included that we could make tacit knowledge explicit, then yes it was a scam. Knowledge does not go away if knowledge management suffers a fad-death. I tried (my point about the wake) to argue that we had an opportunity for rebirth sans-SECI if we focus on the prime purpose of "managing knowledge" namely decision making and inovation.

Hi --

Here is more proof-positive of your view.

http://kmblogs.com/public/item/151583

Cheers,

-j

Dave, you write as a response to a comment:
"I tried (my point about the wake) to argue that we had an opportunity for rebirth sans-SECI if we focus on the prime purpose of "managing knowledge" namely decision making and inovation."

I prefer this, a rebirth! Rather than a total death.
We should not focus on the technology, absolutely, I've been saying this for some time as well. I'm in IT but I always talk of KM as being outside of it.
Clearly it is first a cultural and social issue to make people share knowledge to generate innovation.

Technology will not get rid of the fact that there is nothing as effective as face-to-face communication to share expert knowledge.

Peter
http://leveragingknowledge.blogspot.com

Thanks Peter - your point on face to face is interesting! I am plannign to blog about that tomorrow as part of the natural numbers question. TO be honest my views have changed a bit since I started to blog.

Hello, i love www.cognitive-edge.com! Let me in, please :)

Dave,

You listed two purposes of KM (To support effective decision making; To create the conditions for innovation) but left out two that I think are even more important:
1. To accelerate the spread of useful innovations
2. To allow people to solve problems more quickly by using KM tools to find answers or experts

Decision-making and problem solving are similar, so let me focus on spreading innovations. In KM efforts I've seen, a leading indicator of success is some sort of "pushed" newsletter, e-mail to a distribution list, or blog that informs an interested audience of important news and ideas. In my opinion, "citizen journalism" will be one of the lasting legacies of KM, whether KM itself lives or dies.

Thanks for the comment Bruce. Accelerating the spread of innovation is obviously a good thing, but I would subsume it in creating the conditions. If you don't have an adoption policy (which may include distribution) then you are not creating the conditions in the first place. In respect of using KM tools, well I think that is a means to an end, not an end in itself. KM tools may be the right answer, but a fair number of them prevent effective knowledge flow. The danger is if you start to add in means, you end up with a long list and you prejudge the solution.

I agree that blogs, newsletters etc can be (but are not necessarily always) useful in KM. However again they are a means to and end.

Dave,

I think KM lives, and will live on. Whatever you call it next it still has a fascination with people and continues to be so.

If it is a fad then I guess it has been a fad with me since 2002. I consider that an attempt to understand it's depth and ability to add value to business issues. It is now a subject of study at Universities and it will continue to grow as knowledge workers continue to discover ways to make sense of complexity.

On Nov 21st, 06 you said, "...but the strategic focus is now elsewhere." If this is true. Where do you see this moving to? Value networks? Wikinomics?

Regards,
Bill

I think the purpose of KM, which for me was always improving decision making and creating the conditions for innovation, continues. However if you look at the discussions on ActKM of recent months and elsewhere you will see the increasing dominance of IT. It was always there, but not it is near absolute.

As to futures. Social computing is a movement in its own right, and despite KM attempts to claim it no one with any name or reputation in the field will accept the KM label for understandable reasons. Sense-making is my focus, bringing natural sciences to bear on the old KM problem space and also developing software which is symbiotic with human intelligence.