Category Archives: knowledge management

What I mean by the “best intentions community launch” is when someone or a group of people express that there’s a genuine need for a new CoP, and that they’re the person or people to set it up … and when there is no follow-through and the effort rapidly peters out.

We might chose to focus very much on making agreements, drawing up policies and procedures … getting people to rote learn the company values. You might. And you might be able to win some quasi-legal battles to enforce these agreements. But remember what lies beneath .. the collective mind of culture, the individual conscience. These are stronger currents.

Before the Internet, a library wasn’t something you looked at on screen. It was an actual building in your town, with bookshelves and physical books you could borrow. And it had another curiosity – the librarian. Silent, expressionless and unnoticed, the librarian was, nonetheless, the utter key to this system working.

Far, far more often over my career I have heard projects described as being late, or over budget, or having to be de-scoped due to not delivering … far more often than I have heard the admission that it was the plan that was wrong.

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

One of the objections to investing professionals’ time in KM activities is this idea of “opportunity cost”. Well, I heard this verbatim to my face two times ~20 years apart, but it’s clear the same thinking is far more commonly pervasive than that.

It occurs to me that this concept of inspiration has two distinct flavours, which are very relevant to us in KM.

Sharing with each other across a whole process what each person really does in their role is an easy, fun and productive kind of knowledge sharing.

If you’re producing digital knowledge assets and publishing them on some company or public platform, of course it’s interesting to know if they’re being looked for, found, navigated to, read and downloaded. In various ways and at different levels it’s an indicator of whether you’re targeting a real need, and effectively meeting it. However …

There’s something special about end of project for KM. It’s the first time the project team can look back on the whole project and see how it all went. And maybe their last chance to do so.