How to Build In-the-Flow Knowledge Management Processes?

Comments 05 September 2009

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On his 20:20 Social blog, Sunil talks about the challenges of putting together a knowledge management system for 20:20 Media and shares his KM system wish list:

First, have one; second, keep it simple. I’ve learnt that “not perfect” is better than “not at all,” and that I should want to use it.

My ideal KM system would be an invisible one, so that people use it as part of their day to day work, without realizing that they are doing knowledge management. I am talking about an in-the-flow KM system, where KM is a by-product of people doing their day-to-day work. An in-the-flow KM system is more likely to be adopted that an above-the-flow KM system, which involves people stepping out of the daily flow of work to reflect, codify, and share knowledge. See Michael Idinopulos’s great post on in-the-flow and above-the-flow wikis.

So, my ideal knowledge management system will actually be a built on top of a project management or customer relationship management system, which people use to perform their day-to-day line tasks. I don’t yet know how it will look, but I can imagine that it will involve a more powerful, and more intuitive, wiki and robust tagging and searching capabilities.

I can bet my savings that all the big PM and CRM vendors have serious plans to add KM functionality to their offerings. I also believe that there’s an opportunity here for a new player to build a SaaS-based PM-CRM-KM hybrid for the SME market, one that actually works, unlike the present avatars of BaseCamp and SocialText.

Add that to the list of big opportunities for Indian technology entrepreneurs.

Cross-posted at 20:20 Social.

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Gaurav Mishra

Gaurav Mishra - who has written 746 posts on Gauravonomics Blog on Social Media and Social Change.

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Gautam Ghosh

personally I think the technology bit is a smaller challenge - what is really important is how central do people think that sharing Knowledge is to their and the organizations' benefit?

I mean if people are assessed on an individual basis and there's no real incentive for sharing knowledge - then it won't really happen?

But first of all, every organizations' knowledge is different - for some it might be their IP, for others their list of clients, for others their proposals and contracts - each business has to define it for themselves :-)

By the way you might want to check out my posts on KM

http://gauteg.blogspot.com/search/label/Knowled...

ciao,
Gautam

Gaurav Mishra

@Gautam: That's the entire point I'm trying to make. We need to move from the KM paradigm of people actively creating knowledge to a KM paradigm of knowledge getting created as a by-product of people doing their work.

kaushal sarda

nice point. I think knowledge get created as part of doing some work ( individually or in a collaborative environment). This knowledge once validated gets codified for future use and gets refined constantly. Hence we need our collaboration and communication systems not only to capture knowledge generated through interactions but also provides mechanism to extract and codify the knowledge for further usage and refinement.

Google's wave protocol along with search may provide some interesting avenues for achieving this.

Sahil

"... to a KM paradigm of knowledge getting created as a by-product of people doing their work."

Good thought. What comes to mind is a KM system that is powered by email - since people do work within their inbox most of the time. The earlier KM systems failed because they were just too cumbersome to use and needed people to shift from what they were doing then.