- Mary

- Mary

You've put your finger on a key problem. If we accept Nick Milton's approach, then information does not become actionable until we've applied our knowledge. Since that knowledge is personal and very much tied to context, how precisely does KM assist? Simply through facilitating expertise location? Or is there more?

- Mary

I like your idea of “forward looking” KM. This seems the best approach. It uses KM strategically rather than in a purely reactive fashion. The challenge lies in finding non-intrusive ways of sharing tacit knowledge. This has to mean something different from the old method of badgering experts to “write down what they know.” As Dave Snowden noted in his 7 Principles of KM, that's a fool's errand.

- Mary

If we apply that to the Nick Milton video, we see that knowledge isn't information. And he gives us a clue that IM's job is ensuring that people are given meaningful representations of data to support their work. And their knowledge enables them to act on that information.

But what does KM do? Implicitly, it sits between the information, and the knowing subjects who interpret information, doesn't it? But doing what? And for whom?

I think real KM is different from IM because it is forward looking. It isn't concerned with archiving but with exploring new mechanisms for creating value for the organisation from the collective knowledge of its people. That value comes (as Nonaka recognised) from actually tapping into people's tacit knowledge to create something tangible (not freezing the knowledge into a document, but making something of value). (I explored this back in July: http://blog.tarn.org/2009/07/13/back-to-basics/)

Dave Snowden's recent blogpost about the CKO role also has something to offer here: http://www.cognitive-edge.com/blogs/dave/2009/0...

You raise an interesting point about the pyramid. What would you do differently if you were to create a pyramid that was KM-specific? Is it that the “customers” of KM are different from the “customers” of IM? Or is it that IM and KM really serve different purposes?

- Mary

You're right that information management and KM 1.0 are very close cousins. This may be because of the strong focus of KM 1.0 on collecting documents. What's interesting to me is that despite the understanding of the possibilities of KM 2.0, many knowledge managers (and their employers) still seem stuck on KM 1.0.

- Mary

Thanks for the clarification and the clip by Nick Milton. I agree that the pyramid in the diagram represents results that many parts of a business strive to achieve. What I'm wondering is how many knowledge managers are finding effective ways to meet these goals that involve more than just information management. In other words, what do knowledge managers do that is different from what information managers do? While this question may seem naive, it is not misplaced. A well-regarded law firm knowledge management expert sent me an e-mail in response to this post that contained a single question: What's the difference between the two?

- Mary