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KM as a technology issue. What if knowledge management actually is a technology problem?
Current thinking holds that knowledge management's problems come from too much focus on technology when the key problems are about organizational processes and practices. I've said as much myself on many occasions. But this formulation risks perpetuating the myth that problems are either organizaitonal or technological. We know the real world isn't that simple, of course. We shouldn't contribute to the confusion by oversimplifying our discussion
Technology drives knowledge management issues on two dimensions. The first is the dimension of organizational scale and complexity. Knowledge management is a non-issue below a certain scale. Leveraging and sharing knowledge within co-located, reasonably small groups can be done without resort to technology. Geographic dispersion and numerical scale create knowledge management problems that require the intelligent application of technology. This doesn't mean there are silver bullets to be found with technology, simply that technology is a necessary component of any solution.
This perspective suggests that technology's primary organizational contribution to knowledge management is in establishing a uniform infrastructure and contributing to a consistent language and terminology environment.
The second dimension of technology is as the primary personal tool for the creation of knowledge work outputs and intermediate results. I've touched on this before in knowledge work as craft work. Despite all its troubles and limitations, the PC is an essential tool in the creation and management of knowledge work. Remarkably, organizations and most individual knowledge workers provide little insight or guidance in how to use this tool in a way that creates knowledge work products effectively.
Sure. Bill Gates keeps making promises about how great things are going to be (think Information at Your Fingertips or the Digital Dashboard). All of these visions skip over the niggling details of what you as knowledge worker need to be doing to organize and manage all this lovely data/information/knowledge. The unstated assumption in most of these visions is that someone else will take care of them (either the software vendors or the magicians in the IT department). Some researchers are working on radical technology visions for how to do this. David Gelertner, for example, would have us replace our existing file systems with his scopeware. Great concept and Gelertner is a brilliant thinker. But I'm not holding my breath.
To me K-Logs represent the most interesting recent effort to address this need with a simple solution available right now. They offer a starting point that a knowledge worker can understand and build from.
[McGee's Musings]
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