Legal Research

KM and E2.0

By scott

Greg Lambert at 3 Geeks and a Blog (yes them again) has a post entitled ‘KM’s View of E2.0 - Savior or Harbinger of Death?’ which I read on the way home. It interested me because earlier in the day I had been reading a post by Sourcepov on ‘KM Evolution’ and touched on some of the same themes: KM Vs Enterprise 2.0 (E2.0) /Social Computing (Media).

Greg says “if you look closely, it seems that push of E2.0 into the KM process seems to be coming from external (read: Vendors) rather than from internal (read: KM managers).”

I must admit I found this to be the exact opposite of my personal experience within law firms where it has very much been the internal Knowledge and Information staff who have been the main drivers in pushing E2.0 and recognising its potential to their firms. It has seemed to me that many vendors have been slow to try and exploit the market.

Greg links to a post by Carl Frappaolo entitled “NOW knowledge management is possible - Whaddya Kidding me?” which looks at whether E2.0 is causing an “evolution” or a “revolution” in KM [and also has some funny comments on the idea of ‘pure’ and ‘impure KM] On this, I agree with Greg when he says “KM process is “evolutionary” and can adapt to new ideas such as E2.0 brings to the table”

I agree even more with Doug Cornelius, who in the comments to the post claims “Enterprise 2.0 is savior to Knowledge Management”, and makes a point I keep repeating to people I know looking at E2.0 and this evolving idea of KM, which is: ‘ think selfish’

As Cornelius says, for a long time tradition KM has been focus of the big picture and the need to contribute for the benefit of the wider organisation, but contributing your ‘knowledge’ to a big pot. The problem was (and is) people, whilst seeing there is value to contributing to the pot also see that it offers little direct benefit to them.

Cornelius adds, “I think of Enterprise 2.0 as more analogous to the personal knowledge management. These are tools focused on the individual or small groups. That is where the direct benefit lies. A by-product is the ability of others to find the information.”

I totally agree. I save (and share) thinks to delicious/Diigo/Google Reader, not because I want to contribute to creating a knowledge base, but out of selfishness. The fact that the bi-product of my doing that benefits others makes me happy, but is not my prime reason for doing so. Exploiting this natural feeling within the enterprise is the best way to drive KM and the idea of betting knowledge sharing.

P.S. Can we also just agree that Knowledge Management is a stupid term? How do you ‘manage’ knowledge? Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Full post as published by Information Overload on July 09, 2009 (boomark / email).