KM family relationships

Knowledge Management (KM) has a family relationship problem with its cousins Information Technology (IT) and Information Management (IM)

As kids they all got along fine. But as they grew up things got a bit difficult between their families.

IM is the eldest and was always the quiet, responsible, diligent one. As such IM was often overlooked and that got far worse as IT, the second in age began, very quickly, to grow up.

IT’s the loud one of the bunch and now lives in a big house with a big car. IT seems very popular and has lots of visitors who want to do business together. But all of this had led to a stressful life with many demands. As a result, IT always misses important family dates such as children’s birthdays and compensates for lateness by sending expensive presents but that aren’t quite what the children really wanted.

When KM was born, latest of the three, nobody knew what to make of it. By now IM was living a quiet life, poor as a church mouse, and seemed almost to be in middle age and dependent on IT, now a bit of a ‘godfather’ figure in the family, for work. Most of the aunts and uncles thought this was a sensible arrangement, and hardly missed the old libraries at all once the new tech devices and apps came online. But the children were always disappointed and said they could get better tech if they could just buy what they wanted themselves, please.

When people started to get to know KM some thought it was a new tech device from IT and some, who had forgotten all about, or never knew, IM, thought it sounded like a dull, but sensible thing that was a bit of a hangover from those old libraries.

KM just wanted to be friends with both of its older cousins and also with all the children in the family. When they first met, IM got all excited – it was a long time since there had been any visitors with exactly the same ideas and interests. It was like the dawn of a second youth. “But I like tech as well as information, and I also like learning and process improvement and cultural development and lots of other things too.. and I have some great ideas about communities and intellectual capital” protested KM.

It went a bit different with IT who was friendly enough with the young KM, but really didn’t share the enthusiasm for all these non-tech things that KM went on about and marked KM down as another dreamer, like IM, who couldn’t quite see that this was all quite simply solved with an app and really wasn’t much of an issue to get excited about. Still …

Lots of families have an IT-like character these day, but fewer and fewer have anyone like IM in. So when a KM-like character arrives in a family it can quite easily fall into the niche that should be occupied by an IM. More often the only opportunity for KM in modern families is to join the IT-like person’s firm.

But in its heart KMs always know they still need both kinds of friends … and a distinct place of their own too.

-()-

It’s just a little story.

In real life, when I first went to work big organisations had big libraries with actual books and journals and librarians who knew how to catalogue things, and how to find what you needed. Well, that’s changed. But I do know there are people still doing this stuff and that they know things we still need today.

I’ve always been a great enthusiast for tech – and still am. I’ve worked in and with tech pretty deeply, pretty much all of the time. But I was mostly a consultant and I often heard business consultants who didn’t have that experience proclaim that the tech is easy. Well, let me tell them that the tech only happens because clever, skilled, people, who are well organised with methods and tools, work very hard often for long periods. It’s not easy.

I understand and fully support the IM. I deeply respect and have always got along great with IT. The bit that I want to do, with them and with others, is the innovation, learning and community-building for efficient operations and the delivery of strategy.

IM and IT are far from the only skills and relationships you need in KM – you certainly also need stakeholder, project and change management; probably some solid operations and process skills; and also comms., leadership and people development as well as good grounding in general business. But these ones are interesting because they can be great enablers of KM … or great threats.

Many organisations have no practice of IM at all. Tech has made it possible to easily create endless volumes of content (PowerPoint?) but hasn’t replaced the IM skills that were lost from the days when documents were hardcopy and had to be filed properly with anything like the degree of user-centricity that we need in information governance enablement. So we end up in a mire.

Start up KM in this environment and it’s likely to be seized upon as something either to fill the gap left by depleted IM skills and services, or be reduced to the purely IT elements (it isn’t really KM to just give your organisation Microsoft Teams, folks).

But the tech is wonderful and KMers are likely to be power users pushing forward the exploitation of the capabilities into the core value chain activities of the business, not just into support functions where IT often mostly sits (Finance, HR). And we do need a backbone of IM processes, services and specialists in large organisations; and organisational cultures need to include some of that orderly process for matters such as document and records management.

KM? We don’t want to be managing the bulk of your documents and we don’t want to be touching records management – but we will be able to do better things if someone is – and there’s always the risk that if you think that’s us then we’ll be diverted from the distinctively KM work we should be doing.

Same with your IT. We don’t want to be managing your data or training users in Teams. But, we will use the awesome capabilities of tech and team up with you to create business solutions that address innovation and learning.

If we get these relationships right, we can go places.