In many organisations, and since the uptake of KM started, really, commonly-prescribed processes for KM have usually asked colleagues to take on additional, often rather clerical tasks, in addition to their core work responsibilities. You know the kind of thing I mean: record this piece of information here, for KM; record that piece of information there, for KM. And often there was no new time for this work, so giving rise to the unwelcome phenomenon of work for evenings and weekends (not restricted to KM, but KM falling in with the whole plethora of organisational requirements requiring ‘magical elastic’ use of time – “in the margins”*, as I have heard it referred to!).
So it’s easy to understand why these tasks might not often have got done. Frankly, there was no time allowed for them and managers knew it would be unfair to get too heavy with staff about doing them, given there was no time allowed. So we end up in a fantasy of “this is what we do for KM” whereas actually we don’t because we never supported it.
I’ve never wanted it to be like this and so I’ve always strongly bid to make sure time is allowed and embedded into plans for KM activities. I figure that we can’t really ask people to do something we’re not supporting them to do, but, on the other hand, if we did give them the right support, then we could rightfully expect them to do it.
I had five interviews for my current position, a bit over two years ago. Four of them had the tone of “so, when do you start?” – which was nice! Only one was far more searching, the partner leaning forward, stabbing the air with his finger to drill into the issues. Did I have four ‘nice’ interviews and one ‘nasty’ one? No. I had five good interviews, and one really good one. It was really good because the questions were searching, were well-informed, and told me we would be on the same side of this thing. And one key question was about today’s Thought – when and how will we make KM less of a clerical overhead?
The answers I gave that day are what I still believe, and are I think what we are now seeing:
To begin with, there will still be elements of clerical overhead; but we will mostly counter that by making changes to our policies and practices so that KM tasks are planned for, budgeted for (resource time and budget) and embedded so that they become part of the work, not a separate overhead. So we have those budgets and policies and a growing uptake – although the work here is not complete: I feel that people still impose restrictions on themselves, maybe feeling guilty about not suffering for KM! I’ve seen this and heard about this in other places too.
The second part of my answer was bolder still, I think, and, I think, probably still controversial – and it was this:
Increasingly we will see AI-based integration between work/line-of-business IT and KM IT so that the AI will make more and more of the connections for us. The example I gave, and it will be one many will know, though it’s just one example and no more than that, is the Microsoft 365 platform. More and more, teams are using content, data, collaboration, messaging and workflow apps that are integrated elements of one platform, and where there are underlying connections being made automatically across them (in the case of M365 it’s the Graph) and these connections then being exposed for user benefit (e.g., in M365 through the Viva applications and so on).
I do believe that we are starting to see this possibility. After all, even though your whole work may not be online, and the part that is may not wholly be in one environment (such as M365), it is still the case that for many users in many organisation a great deal of it is. So the intelligent part of this platform can start to tell you things you maybe didn’t know: who you interacted with most, who else is in your network; how many meetings you had. Seed it with the right structure of topics and it can start to make meaningful connections between people, projects and work – the kind of connections we may have been asking that people note down manually.
It’s going to be a long journey and some will have legitimate doubts about being monitored or second-guessed like this – plus the AI is going to need a big hand up from humans as well. But I can see this trend at last starting. In the meanwhile, making space for KM within the core work rather than tacking it on must remain strategy #1.
*Nobody has any ‘margins’ in their time any more – nor did they back then either.
AI4KM - Robert Taylor 