The Future of Knowledge

Management
DISCUSSION PAPER

This paper is the result of discussions with

many KM leaders about the current quandary
of the KM discipline, and how ‘social software’,
weblogs, and the perceived need for
improvement in front-line worker productivity
could present KM leaders with an opportunity
to ‘reinvent’ the discipline and make it much
more valuable. Opinions expressed are the
author’s and not those of his employer.

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© Dave Pollard, October 2003
The writing is on the wall for Knowledge Management, once the darling
of business schools and business gurus, and the fastest growing area
in Management Consulting. The evidence is everywhere:
budgets for KM have been slashed everywhere, and whole KM
departments eliminated
many companies are now trying to outsource KM, no longer
viewing it as a core competency
where at one time six of the top 10 best sellers at Books for
Business were about KM, now very few KM titles even crack the
list
writers are starting to predict ‘the death of KM’, lament ‘where
did KM go wrong’ and even decry ‘the autism of KM’
there are now fewer Chief Knowledge Officers in Fortune 500
companies than there were five years ago
half of the KM conferences scheduled in the past year in Toronto
were cancelled for lack of interest

The concept was a good one. There is no question that most

organizations, especially large ones, do a poor job at managing their
intellectual capital, and that this capital provides an increasingly
important part of organizations’ value. Desktop and laptop computers
have become ubiquitous in business, but the return on this investment
generally ranges from unmeasurable to unsatisfactory. The
expectations were that KM would be able to improve
growth and innovation in organizations,
productivity and efficiency (reflected in absolute cost savings),
customer relationships,
employee learning, satisfaction and retention, and
management decision-making.
It has arguably failed on all counts.

The reason for this failure was the unrealistic expectation that human
organizational behaviour could be changed, in all kinds of positive
ways, by persuading people of the wisdom of capturing, sharing and
archiving knowledge. Unfortunately, people only change their
behaviour when there is an overwhelmingly compelling argument to do
so (not the ‘leap of faith’ on which much of KM was predicated), or
where there is simply no alternative. Before KM, the way in which
people shared knowledge was person-to-person, just-in-time, and in
the context of solving a specific business problem. A decade later, that
is still the way most people share knowledge, even in the ‘Most
Admired Knowledge Organizations’:

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© Dave Pollard, October 2003
 growth is achieved by better selling techniques and beating or
buying competitors;
innovation is achieved by listening to customers articulate
business needs and developing creative solutions that address
them;
productivity improvement is achieved by downsizing and
outsourcing ‘non-core-competency’ activities;
customer relationships are improved by increasing ‘face-time’
with customers.
employee learning is improved on-the-job, learning one-on-one
from those doing the job now, and by making mistakes;
employee satisfaction and retention is improved when bosses
invest in one-on-one face-time with employees and offer them
interesting assignments, responsibility and promising career
opportunities; and
decision-making is improved when management and front-line
people know their business, know their customers, know the
business environment, and apply this knowledge intelligently.

In all of these things, personal knowledge—of the market, the

business, and customer and employee wants and needs—is essential
to success. But in none of these things has Knowledge Management
proven to be either a critical element or a key differentiator. It has not
demonstrated any competitive advantage to the organizations that
have invested in it.

What, then, is the value proposition for KM, if there is one at all? The
answer to this question lies in the Peter Drucker’s assertion that the
greatest challenge to business management in the 21st century is, and
will be, improving the personal productivity and effectiveness of front-
line workers doing increasingly complex and unique jobs. Unlike the
work world of the last two centuries, most employees today either
come into their jobs knowing more than their boss about how to do it,
or quickly acquire such superior knowledge from their peers and from
personal experience on-the-job. Every job today, every process, is
unique, and therefore the expectation that KM systems could capture
‘best practices’ and ‘success stories’ and ‘lessons learned’ that could be
reapplied by others again and again was unrealistic.

I believe that if KM hopes to save itself from imminent extinction, it

needs to acknowledge and act upon the truth of Drucker’s assertion
above, and the following two principles that reflect what ‘improving
personal productivity and effectiveness of front-line workers’ means
with regards to knowledge:

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© Dave Pollard, October 2003
1. Knowledge is most effectively and efficiently conveyed to front-
line workers by other front-line workers or outside experts, one-
on-one, just-in-time, and in the context of solving a specific
business problem.
Implication A for KM: Emphasis should be on capturing
specialized know-who, i.e. the granular identification of
experts inside and outside the organization whose expertise
can be quickly brought to bear to solve specific problems, and
the best means of contacting those experts just-in-time. The
tools that do this are called Expertise Finders (see Appendix
1), and they are one category of a newly-developed collection
of software applications called Social Network Enablement
Software (or ‘Social Software’ for short).
Implication B for KM: Know-what and even know-how in
centralized repositories should therefore be de-emphasized,
since it is hit-and-miss and impossible to contextualize,
except in very prescribed situations. In those prescribed
situations (e.g. call centre automation), it should be filtered
and embedded in expert systems to make its re-use effective
and efficient.
2. Front-line workers have a large array of tools and technologies
at their disposal, but rarely know how to use these tools and
technologies competently, and when they do, they often find
that these tools and technologies force them to think and work in
ways that are not intuitive to them, interfering with rather than
helping their work effectiveness.
Implication C for KM: The best use of ‘knowledge
professionals’ is working in tandem with (or even as part of)
the organization’s IT professionals, devoting the bulk of their
time to scheduled, one-on-one ‘personally productivity’
sessions with front-line workers to improve these workers’
competency with worktools, and ability to do their own
research & analysis.
Implication D for KM: A related challenge to personal
productivity is personal content management, the capture,
organization, recall and dissemination of documents,
messages and other personal knowledge in an intuitive,
transparent, automatic, personally customizable and simple
manner. There is a new class of tools that achieve this
objective, called weblogs (a kind of publishable personal
electronic filing cabinet – see Appendix 2). KM could play a
critical role in the introduction of weblogs to organizations.
KM could also be involved in the development of knowledge

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© Dave Pollard, October 2003
mining tools (another category of ‘Social Software’) that
would work with Expertise Finders to identify experts. These
mining tools would also allow workers (with the appropriate
permissions) to ‘browse’, peer-to-peer, an expert’s weblog
(like browsing through his filing cabinet) as a surrogate or
proxy if the expert him/herself was unavailable or too costly
to involve in the project.
Implication E for KM: The new Value Propositions for KM then
become (a) improving personal effectiveness of front-line
workers (allowing them to do more, and more productive,
work in less time), (b) improving personal connectivity of
front-line workers (allowing them to draw on, acquire and
employ new and improved competencies and networks), (c)
reduce personal travel costs (allowing these funds to be
deployed elsewhere, freeing up time for other personal and
work-related activities, and allowing ‘virtual’ participation in
valuable but previously-unaffordable distant conferences and
learning events), and (d) as a consequence of the above,
dramatically increase ROI on management’s investment in
technology and knowledge resources. Measuring the success
of KM will therefore entail developing new yardsticks for these
four value propositions.

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© Dave Pollard, October 2003
For most organizations that have invested heavily in KM, this would
represent a radical change. This table contrasts the current and future
KM functions.

Function Current State Future State Note on

Roles
Research & May be part of KM Researchers will
Analysis business unit or provide personalized
split among other training in how to do
business units. research and analysis
yourself; and will do
less research
themselves.
Intranet & Centrally-managed Personal weblog-based Conversion of
Extranet tools and ‘world of ends’ existing Intranet
Architecture repositories and architecture; anyone & Extranet to new
Development & publishing and can publish, anyone can Weblog-based
Management permissioning subscribe, peer-to-peer architecture will
environment. browsing, expertise be a major one-
finders, knowledge time project;
mining and other ‘social development of
software’; Centrally- social software
managed expert applications and
systems where expert systems
processes are will be ongoing
prescriptive; Extranet is
an extension of the
Intranet, with different
permissioning
protocols.
Community of Usually centrally- Self-managing CoP facilitator will
Practice (CoP) managed support communities and self- be part of the CoP
Management function. managed community itself rather than
tools and spaces a central function
(another ‘social
software’ category).
Database May be part of KM External databases and Gradually
Purchasing & business unit or resources are diminished need
Subscriptions split among other subscribed to and as external
business units; accessible individually vendors move to
fixed price site- the same way internal automatic RSS
licenses negotiated weblogs are, with subscription basis
in advance plus automatic tracking for
pay-as-you-go volume rebate
services. purposes.
Knowledge Centrally-developed Personal, one-on-one Big shift from
Training, curricula, web- scheduled training; development and
Communication & based learning each front-line worker running of
Content tools, e-newsletters selects their own courses and
Management & content taxonomy, organization communications
management and access to one-on-one

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© Dave Pollard, October 2003
 architecture; users (permissioning). personal,
are trained in scheduled
taxonomy, training
database layout and
access.

Bottom line: No change in headcount or basic KM functions but a huge

shift in roles, from responsive help-desk services to proactive personal
one-on-one services, and major decentralization of architecture,
content, subscribing and publishing to the individual desktop. The
benefits to management: (a) better return on technology & knowledge
investment, (b) valuable understanding of what front-line workers
need to do their jobs more effectively, and aren’t getting, and of
course (c) happier, more productive staff.

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© Dave Pollard, October 2003
 Appendix 1: How an Expertise Finder Works
(Inter-organizational Future State)
You are the CFO of Company Y, depicted in the lower right corner of this chart. You need to find out
about a proposed change to the tax code for R&D Tax Credits. Before Social Network Enablement
(SNE) software, you would have typed the term into the intranet search engine, checked the public
CCRA/IRS website or some purchased tax service your company buys, or just picked up the phone
and called Jan, your accountant who works for Company X. Alas, Jan just left on a three-week
vacation. Since you've implemented SNE software, however, it’s easy. You key the term into your
Expertise Finder and up pops the picture below. As you expected, Jan appears as one of the experts.
This Expertise Network diagram shows all and only the experts and connections related specifically to
the subject of R&D Tax Credits.

It tells you that the R&D department of your company has some information on tax credits on their team
blog, which they've posted to the R&D Community of Practice intranet site. It also tells you that Jan has
access to this intranet site, and that this intranet site subscribes to Jan's Tax Credit blog category. It also
identifies two other people at the accounting firm that have expertise on this topic, since Jan is
unavailable, and a customer of both your company and your accountant, who outsources his R&D to your
company and qualifies for a 'flow-through' of the Research Tax Credit and hence is very knowledgeable
about how these credits work. And a supplier who sells a Tax Credit Analyzer to your accountants, and a
tax credit expert advisor to your accountants who, it turns out, went to high school with you and might
cough up the knowledge you want for free, are also identified.

So you have lots of alternatives. In Jan's absence you can phone or e-mail or IM any of six other
identified experts, or subscribe to their blogs, or buy the Tax Credit Analyzer yourself (knowing your
accountants thought it good enough to buy), or tap into the R&D group's CoP tool or the accountants'
extranet. Problem solved.

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© Dave Pollard, October 2003
Appendix 2: Layout of a Weblog

Recap: With Social Software:

• The entire issue of centralized content collection and management goes away. Everyone does
their own.
• The intranet becomes a people-to-people connector instead of a content repository, a 'link
harvester', scanning all traffic across it and dynamically identifying connections to people and
their knowledge. New tools would be needed to allow such functionality. These would be
Social Software tools, not KM tools.
• The intranet architecture begins to look more like that of a telephone switch than that of a
DBMS. It gets very skinny. There are no central databases.
• Each individual's subscribable, personally-indexed weblog becomes a surrogate or proxy for
the individual when s/he's not available personally.
• Organizational boundaries become irrelevant. It doesn't matter whether the person you are
sharing with is a work colleague, a supplier, customer, friend or advisor, an individual or a
team, inside or outside the company. You share what you know with those you trust, period.
Security would hence be provided at the individual level, not managed by the enterprise. The

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© Dave Pollard, October 2003
same way employees know what hard-copy documents can be shared with whom, they set up
‘subscription’ access to their blog categories correspondingly

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© Dave Pollard, October 2003
Appendix 3: Other Voices Chime In
“Intel's IT organization has recently reorganized itself to combine the
knowledge management, collaboration and personal productivity
groups. Called eWorkforce, the group supports knowledge worker use
of PCs, laptops, cell phones and PDAs. The primary goal is to develop
integrated solutions for knowledge worker processes—e.g. arranging
and conducting an asynchronous meeting or managing a project. While
I believe it's a great step forward to integrate devices and support
organizations, I'd argue that to make real progress in knowledge
worker productivity, we need to disintegrate the target audience. All
knowledge workers aren't alike…

I'm more confident than ever about the importance—and the difficulty
—of addressing the topic of knowledge worker productivity. Just
remember: It's the Next Big Thing, and you heard it here first.”
-- Tom Davenport, CIO Magazine, Oct. 2003

The fatal flaw in thinking in terms of knowledge management is in

adopting the perspective of the organization as the relevant
beneficiary. Discussions of knowledge management start from the
premise that the organization is not realizing full value from the
knowledge of its employees. While likely true, this fails to address the
much more important question from a knowledge worker's perspective
of "what's in it for me?". It attempts to squeeze the knowledge
management problem into an industrial framework eliminating that
which makes the deliverables of knowledge work most valuable--their
uniqueness, their variability. This industrial, standardizing, perspective
provokes suspicion and both overt and covert resistance. It also starts
a cycle of controls, incentives, rewards, and punishments to elicit what
once were natural behaviours.

Suppose, instead, that we turn our attention from the problems of the
organization to the problems of the individual knowledge worker. What
happens? What problems do we set out to solve and where might this
lead us?

Our goal is to make it easier for a knowledge worker to create and

share unique results.

-- Jim McGee, Professor, Kellogg School of Business, Oct. 2003

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© Dave Pollard, October 2003