rickmans’s posterous

does nikhil know about this article? :-p

ssssht :P.

I don't think KM's have anything to be concerned with just yet. Many organisations are yet to reach a level of maturity when attempting Knowledge Management and all of the socio-collab tools do nothing more than confuse the issue for them. Knowledge Manager's should be working hand in hand with Enterprise 2.0 evangelists to find the right platforms and processes to improve their organisations capabilty.

Thanks Rick for sharing the link to this article and Thanks Lee for remembering me! ;-)

You might find this surprising, but I more than agree with you, Rick! And which is why I had posted my thoughts around this in a blog post earlier titled Social Media League. Obviously the name was a bit fancy and glamorous but the end objective was that KMs are not really content managers who would obviously get obsolete with new E2.0 tools. But KMs role? No! I think KMs are much more than just content aggregators and content organizers etc.

KMs are supposed to be involved in every activity an org. does and provide inputs / ideas / education on what, how, when, where, why to share the data/info/knowledge. They are supposed to be mentors, evangelists and friends who would help anyone and everyone to achieve success and the end objective they had set out with. If a company wants to increase revenues, cut costs, become #1, etc then how can knowledge that is already existing in people's head, tools, systems, papers etc inside the org. can be best leveraged to reach that goal. And I think thats what a KM should be doing!

If it means E2.0 tools, then yes; if it means training, then yes, if it means culture classes, then yes, if it means talking to people, then yes! :-)

Actually I can just go on! ;-) Thanks for the trigger, Rick! These are the kinda things that keep me going!

The title Knowledge Manager was a misnomer from the beginning, because it is up to every individual to decide what knowledge is valuable and to share it. If an organization wants a point person for knowledge management efforts, his or her title should be Knowledge Facilitator. That person's role should be to assist individuals in identifying and sharing explicit knowledge, and to help people find other individuals with knowledge relevant to a problem to be solved.

I agree that Enterprise 2.0 technologies are making even the Knowledge Facilitator role increasingly unnecessary, but it may still be useful to have one or more people facilitating knowledge flow inside extremely large, global organizations.

I think the role of facilitator is still going to be very important going forward. The road to Enterprise 2.0 success going to be a long one requiring changes in culture and modes of operation. Knowledge managers need to increasingly see themselves as change managers in order to stay relevant. Even when the transition is over, I think we'll still need full-time people (analogous to gnomes/gardeners in the wiki world) who maintain a helicopter view of the network and help to spot gaps and streamline it's functioning. But we are talking about roles that do not yet exist formally in most organizations, for example, that of Network Weaver or Discovery Champion.

I agree with Larry and Nikhil. Any organisation that is using social software seriously has probably gone beyond the need for the kind of formal KM that wikipedia describes. The role of KM now is to evangelise (not just to work with the E2.0 evangelists) and to identify and encourage the right community behaviours to ensure that everyone makes the most of these technologies to help them in their work and thereby make the organisation better.

Yes. But "new" means change the way they practice their craft. I agree w/Larry - the title feels like a misnomer. Now more than ever I think KM's will need to evolve their role to one focusing on facilitation, curation, and enabling flow. In fact, flow is what its all about isn't it? Old style KM created silos. Rigorous classification, ontologies, taxonomies, etc. have their place. But they create filters that knowledge must flow through. Too many filters, content hierarchies, arcane semantics... bad. Free flow, search, tag folksonomies, search, *person centric document sharing*, search... good.

I like the term knowledge facilitator as replacement of knowledge manager. Thanks for your replies!

Rick -

Given the wide range of extant KM roles, the warning about obsolescence is probably a little premature. Nonetheless, there are certain KM roles that are likely to go the way of the dodo sooner rather than later. For example, pure archivist roles (e.g., collecting and organizing content according to a strict taxonomy) seem outdated and poor stewardship of limited corporate resources in this E2.0 world. On the other end of the spectrum, the knowledge manager as process expert is a role that could have longevity, yet many organizations have not explored it. The sweetspot for most knowledge managers will likely be to help develop tools that are so embedded in the business process that organizational knowledge is captured and made available for sharing as we work -- without any significant additional effort. Further, knowledge managers who have interdisciplinary expertise or responsibility are perfectly poised to facilitate innovation. If we focus solely on facilitating collaboration, knowledge sharing and innovation, we'll have more than enough to keep us occupied and employed for a long time.

- Mary

I have to agree with some of the comments here. I don't agree with the categorical death of KM: "The knowledge manager is becoming obsolete, since the group is regulating itself via the use of new tools." In some industries this is the case; but in many, KM is still very relevant. What would help is when companies articulate their goals. Managing Knowledge due to 'faith that knowledge should be managed' is not a goal. Fear of knowledge loss is not a goal. Some companies do KM for squishy reasons, and these are easily replaced with e2.0 (albeit similar squishyness, but allegedly cheaper). Others that have real money associated with KM (either to be gained or to prevent loss) still have business needs -- E2.0 with KM will help. Not, E2.0 instead of KM.

Social Enterprises might have the ability to fuel relevance engines via the use of E2.0 tools, but they are not going to do to the more rigorous librarian-style work that some KM folks do today. At least not yet. Two reasons: 1. the tools are not focused on the KM workflow steps (yet), and 2. you still need to have someone assigned to ensure it get's done. So your examples are right -- those KM jobs that did nothing but rubber-stamp documents with a taxonomy and relevance tag will be obsolete. But there still are some KM roles that are much more sophisticated. So E2.0 does not kill KM, it refines it by filtering out the useless jobs and focusing on the value-added work. And yes, KM could use a new name. It would help. But I don't think that E2.0 is that new name.

My 2 paisa, I do think that the traditional role of a KM is indeed going to die a natural death. This is in fact my new favorite question to ask all the people i interview to hire into the KM team here in India, most of them are tongue tied, but some come with brilliant answers. Essentially, the way the KM role came into existence from a content manager, i think there is more than one avenue into which the role of a KM can evolve, one could be the facilitation that has been discussed in the other comments. In my personal opinion the key way forward for the KM role to evolve is to be the directors(controlling flow) of information in a proactive manner to drive various agenda in an organization including Strategy, Sales and Innovation. We have a long way to go in Capgemini itself, but in a decade, this is where I think the KMs of today need to start thinking about.