IFLA 2010: How should we roll-out global KM initiatives (2/3)?

This blog post is a part of a presentation I gave at the 76th World Library and Information Congress. In the presentation, I explained why we should embrace KM initiatives, how we should do this, and how a global KM initiative has successfully been implemented. 

After mentioning in the previous weblog post that there are two incentives in global development aid why they should embrace global KM initiatives, I will now continue to explain how institutes, NGOs and many more of these clubs should roll-out a global KM initiative. It will be a bit of theoretical background to the third and final weblog post in this collection, which is about the Focuss.Info Initiative and will be submitted at the end of this week.

Moving from knowledge stocks to knowledge flows

By focussing on knowledge flows we manage to get the latest information and knowledge that is available. Let me give you an example.

Think about the old fashioned KM way. We work on a project and at the end of this project we write a report that describes the process. After writing such a report it is often stocked in a database, and will be made retrievable to others who might be interested in this specific knowledge about running a project.

A year later, a colleague is starting a new project. She accesses the database and uses some time to find and evaluate documents that could help her to manage her project in a good way. She finds the document from this colleague, but it is already one year old, and what was the context of that particular project? Is it applicable to this project, because in a year time some things could have changed a lot.

So, in this so-called old-fashioned KM way, people are creating stocks of knowledge which is time-consuming. We need to make knowledge explicit, phrase language so that it can be understood by others, and eventually others should retrieve the knowledge in a database.

And by making knowledge explicit we also lose a lot of context: the context we need to know in order to judge whether it is applicable in an other situation. Dave Snowden, one of the major KM thinkers of this time, argues in one of his most-cited weblog posts that "we always know more than we can say, and we will always say more than we can write down". So, he argues that the process of taking things from our heads, to our mouths to our hands involves loss of content and context.

Therefore it is important to focus on knowledge flows. Get in contact with the person who managed the project, follow her, and tap into her current knowledge base. And by starting conversations, we can create a stimulus for recall, because we only know what we know when we need to know it. Small verbal or non-verbal clues can provide these ah-ha moments when a memory is recalled.

Cultural impact on knowledge flows

Snowden also argues that knowledge can only be volunteered and it cannot be conscripted. We cannot go to someone - virtually or physically - and ask him or her to share knowledge. We cannot make someone share their knowledge. We first need trust someone fully before this person will share his or her knowledge. Therefore KM initiatives should create a culture of trust and transparency.

And when we start to embrace the latest information sharing and collaboration technologies, we often do not know each other because we can be someone from the other side of the world, and by using these technologies we are often missing the physical contact.

We therefore need to obtain new skills or conditions in order to be trusted in networks and to be successful in knowledge sharing initiatives. We need to change our culture where we are working in, because for decennia we created trusted bonds by looking straight in the eyes. By using these new information sharing and collaboration tools we often cannot do this, and this can give an uncomfortable feeling (sharing something without knowing the other person). In order to make sure that people are not becoming uncomfortable with these situation - situations which will be more common than rare - we should also focus on the cultural issues when launching a KM initiative.

2-folded strategy to roll-out global KM initiatives

Working in a network-based environment is indeed requiring new cultural abilities. KM initiatives should therefore focus on two abilities. I describe these abilities as promoting structural knowledge and cultural knowledge. 

Structural knowledge means that people should have the ability - or the knowledge so to speak - to use the new information sharing and collaboration tools. This ability helps people to benefit the ease to connect, which eventually helps them better to collaborate and tap into ongoing conversations.

But what are technologies that improve the ease to connect worth when there is no willingness to connect? Therefore, people should also have the ability to work in these new cross-border and cross-cultural collaborative environments. And in my view this kind of culture should feel real and enhances transparency.

This two-folded approach of structural and cultural knowledge has successfully been adopted in the field of global development cooperation with the Focuss.Info Initiative. The third, and final, weblog post will describe more about this

IFLA 2010: Why should we roll-out global KM initiatives (1/3)?

This blog post is a part of a presentation I gave at the 76th World Library and Information Congress. In the presentation, I explained why we should embrace KM initiatives, how we should do this, and how a global KM initiative has successfully been implemented. 

In this weblog post I describe two incentives why there is a need for global KM initiatives in particular global development aid. The first one is a domain specific incentive within global development aid and is known as the brain drain of countries in the Global South. The second one is a specific incentive to the domain of KM which argues that organisations should move from managing knowledge stocks to distributing knowledge flows.

Incentive 1: brain gain vs brain drain

To develop as a country, people open doors that were locked before, and they need therefore explore new territories. To make sense of these new territories and decide over the new things they see, feel and hear, the newest knowledge is required. So, what I want to say is that every country is in this process of developing itself and entering new territories. But it depends on the level of knowledge within the countries to successfully make sense of and decide over these new situations. 

And when you are successfully steering your country through new developments, your country will most probably become more developed than the others, and the developed country ends up in a state of prosperity. This prosperity in often wealth, but also happiness and health, creates a magnet to the ones who live in less developed countries and who want to come enjoy the same prosperity. And the ones who can make such a move are often the intellectuals or well-resourced people from a less-developed country. So, you can see that through this the already well-developed countries would then get a brain gain and the less-developed countries a brain drain. 

The brain drain is not only something that is typical to global development cooperation. It is also something that happens among businesses in - especially - Europe and North- America.

On one side, businesses experience that many people will soon retire and, on the other side, there are not enough people to fill in the empty spaces because young people are studying longer. So even though technology is connecting the digital world as a whole through the Internet and mobile communication; the current situation in - especially - Europe and North America - is disconnecting the real world as a whole. 

That’s why there is an increasing notion that we all need to become better in knowledge sharing in a network-based working environment - with the assistance of technology. 

Most people can nowadays get information at very low or no cost without any difficulties. They then can make sense of this information through their social networks. The one who can run this process most successfully will generate new knowledge rapidly and eventually make decisions faster which can be more innovative than others. This shows that information sharing and collaboration tools are crucial to be successful.

Incentive 2: Knowledge Flows

This brings me to the second incentive why organisations should focus on a collaborative platform to share and create knowledge between the global North and South. This has to do with the way how we share knowledge.

Around 15 years ago we experienced the first big focus from organisations in the discipline of KM. Nonaka and Takeuchi introduced a first generation of KM by arguing that tacit knowledge could be transferred to explicit knowledge. And in the same period, computer technology was seen as the solution to every organisational problem. That‘s why organisations started implementing computer technologies for capturing and codifying all of the staff members’ knowledge. But the degree of transfer from tacit to explicit knowledge depended on the necessity; Nonaka and Tackeuchi did not argue that all of the knowledge in the heads and conversations had, should or could have been made explicit. Nonetheless, at that time, IT companies jumped in this new market of KM and promoted a strategy that was aimed at changing knowledge from an organisational liability to an organisational asset by focussing on knowledge stocks.

These knowledge stocks grew out into massive databases in which users increasingly experienced problems finding an answer on their information query, and the database administrators were using excessive resources to keep running the databases. So, KM became a failure and more and more organisations did not understand the added-value of all the financial and human resources it had used to stock the knowledge.

But years after that and with the introduction and implementation of social technology, KM luckily attracted much of the attention back. A reason of this upheaval was that these social technologies, or I prefer to say information sharing and collaboration tools, let us work collaboratively by means of relationships. Because through these relations we can easily start with cross-border and cross-cultural conversations.

Just think about platforms such as MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter. Through all of these initiatives, people share knowledge through conversations - even though these people are spread over the world. That’s why the newest technologies enhances knowledge sharing by not focussing on knowledge stocks, but on knowledge flows. I therefore want to argue that in order to be successful in launching a KM initiative, we should apply these latest technologies.