Liever geen kennismanagement

Kennismanagement. Een term die ik liever niet gebruik. Dave Pollard van How save the world zit met eenzelfde worsteling. Maar hij geeft wat mij betreft ook een nieuwe wending aan de discussie over deze term en vooral ook aan het denken over het belang ervan. Enkele quote’s.

Over de veranderde focus in het kennismanagement denken.

• From content to connectivity, with social networking applications and expertise-finding and community-building processes taking over in priority from the populating and management of massive, just-in-case, context free repositories of documents, and
• From corporate content management to personal content management, with simple, intuitive tools, personalized processes and one-on-one personal effectiveness training taking over in priority from complex, one-size-fits-all intranet tools, portals, ‘productivity’ software, and undifferentiated training

Over de activiteiten die bij het managen van kennis een rol spelen.

Over de zoektocht naar een term die de lading beter dekt.

I’ve never liked the term ‘Knowledge Management’, so having circumscribed the set of activities that KM was supposed to be about, I decided to ponder what would be a less presumptuous and more precise name for a discipline that would purport to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of how we do these things. It is broader than just ’thinking’ or ‘information processing’ or ‘learning’, but narrower than ‘productivity’ (which can describe physical as well as intellectual activity). It has much to do with helping people carry out these activities better — enablement and facilitation and making work easier. There are no words for this in the English language, or any other language I’m familiar with, which is perhaps why the awful term Knowledge Management came to be used. How do you reduce making workers’ intellectual activities easier, and more effective to a couple of words? The best I can come up with is the clumsy ‘Intellectual Work Effectiveness Improvement Facilitation’, and since most work today is intellectual, and most of what support departments do is facilitation, we might drop the first and last words. But ‘Work Effectiveness Improvement’ is perilously close to the ’90s fad called Business Process/Performance Improvement (BPI, also known as Re-engineering).

En over de functiebeschrijving van de mensen die zich er mee bezig houden.

• Identify and introduce easy-to-use, intuitive personal content management and social networking tools to improve workers’ facility in finding the information and the experts they need to do their jobs effectively.
• Work one-on-one to understand the problems each worker is having acquiring and processing information, and finding, contacting and working with experts; provide them with personalized training, tools, suggested processes and ‘cheat sheets’ to address these problems; and, if these problems are endemic to the organization or can’t be solved at the individual level, bring them back to management with recommendations for more systematic changes. [this is the only element of this job description that would require any staff — all the rest is a one-person job]
• Identify, and then with executive sponsorship establish standards, procedures, filters and measurements to reduce unnecessary e-mails, information flows, paperwork, meetings and interruptions that prevent and interfere with critical work activities. Track and aim to halve the aggregate amount of ‘non value added’ time.
• Work with Learning leaders to develop voluntary training programs that can enhance time management, information management, work prioritization and oral communication (including story-telling!) skills.
• Assess the aggregate cost to the organization of information (buying it, storing it, looking for it, reading it, figuring out what it means, managing it) and also the aggregate cost to the organization of not knowing — the cost of failures (lost contracts etc.) and errors that demonstrably could have been prevented or mitigated had there been more or better information available. Use these measures to objectively evaluate information adequacy, quality, and overload, and recommend changes to tools, repositories, and processes.
• Develop a set of Work Effectiveness Principles customized for the organization that can be used to influence and drive strategy, structure, policy, and behaviour in the organization.

Wat mij betreft geeft Pollard hiermee nieuwe impulsen aan het denken over kennismanagement. En over die term kennismanagement: ik vrees dat we er nooit meer vanaf zullen komen.