Allowing software vendors and consultants to hijack good ideas and turn them into the same old same old.

KM = hierarchical straitjacket about which no=one cares

Social Software = freedom to choose - everyone cares

There is a great list from years ago (11 Deadly Sins), let me know if you need that reposted. Sadly, most of them are still being committed.

One other that comes to mind immediately is claiming to have the "one true path" to KM. Think certifications or my favorite: "discovering" a pure engineering approach to KM problems.

Another may be pursuing KM without any operational objective - KM for its own sake. You and I may tussle on that one, but it has wasted millions among my US Gov clients. Our latest 'crisis' is the "need" to "do more information sharing!" (emphasis added)

Lust - insisting on "best of breed" solutions with all the bells and whistles simply because someone some day might conceive of a way to use it - when all you really need are three simple tools to do a handful of straightforward things

Gluttony - trademarking a successful intervention in one context in one organisation and turning it into a worldwide consulting crusade tied to you and you alone

Avarice - imagining that you can capture all your organisation's knowledge into a single knowledg repository

Sloth - hiring consultants in the expectation that they will figure out your problems and solve them all for you with minimal (preferably no) involvment and effort from you or your company's management team

Wrath - making a business of elevating your stature and selling your services by knocking other people down and decrying other methods

Envy - looking at what other people are doing in KM and imagining that you can do KM simply by going through imitative motions - aka benchmarking to best practices

Pride - in CoPs in consulting and in facilitation thinking you know what's best for a community and making unilateral decisions based on your power status

The original 11 Deadlies - I only wish I'd written them.

1) Not developing a working definition of knowledge
2) Emphasizing knowledge stock to the detriment of knowledge flow
3) Viewing knowledge as existing predominantly outside the heads of individuals
4) Not understanding that a fundamental intermediate purpose of managing knowledge is to create shared context
5) Paying little heed to the role and importance of tacit knowledge
6) Disentangling knowledge from its uses
7) Downplaying thinking and reasoning
8) Focusing on the past and the present and not on the future
9) Failing to recognize the importance of experimentation
10) Substituting technological contact for human interface
11) Seeking to develop direct measures of knowledge
("Drift or Shift", Fahey and Prusak, 1998)

.. sent an email, but skimmed the back-half of your blog post too quickly and did not notice the timing. Too late. Sorry.

I was there and heard him refer to your answers. Good job by the way, and I'm looking forward to digging into more of your writings!

Btw, even freedom has to have champions no?

/Henning

The greatest current KM sin is the utter lack of any competence in social computing and social media.

Just say RSS, blogs, wikis to a institutional KM person. What they hear is, "blah, blah, blah."

However, the grandaddy, the NUMBER ONE ALL TIME KM SIN is:

* Faliure to Focus on the Future *

This is a mortal sin. KM people that commit it go straight to hell. Hell is an enterprise KM portal, an infinite KM best practices document repository and hotel ballroom vendor conference with Satan giving perpetual PowerPoint presentations on KM.

BTW, 30 minutes for this topic is not enough time. You could use 30, er, 40-days for this rich topic!

-j