16 Knowledge Management Myths Debunked: Misconceptions of KM

 

The notion that we can make people do things is naive. For example, we say we'll make them maintain their expertise profiles. How many people have been able to successfully make someone maintain their expertise profile? It's not something we tend to like to do or contribute all documents. In the early days of KM, weíd say, "Contribute all your documents and then we'll put them in a repository, and then we can reuse all of them." No one likes to do that. The idea that we can make somebody do something is not valid. If we make them do it and we enforce it, they'll do it to the minimum extent possible.

 

Forced membership in communities isn't a good idea. Participation in communities should be voluntary. Or the notion that everyone's going to start from one home page. That's naive. We think, here's our internet home page. We're going to put a banner ad on there because everyone will go there. But they won't. They're going to bookmark some other page and go there and you're not going to be able to determine where they go. Don't even try to. Instead, once again, back to the power of pull, try to pull them in, and if you need to locate expertise and an alternative to that is instead of making people fill in their expertise profile, let them join communities and let the expertise emerge in the community.

 

 

My work is primarily in communities and in collaboration, and I always hear community used in sometimes strange ways, as if everything is a community. Sometimes, I hear entire populations referred to as a community. My own notion of community is that it's a voluntary group that you join because you want to get better at something, not something that defines the organization you're in, or defines the ethnicity that you have, or whatever it is. There are all these odd notions of community.

 

To me, a community is something you choose to join because you want to meet up with other people who are interested in the same subject. A community is not a website. It's not a Wiki. It's not a blog. It's not an ESN. It's not an organization. It's not a project team. It's just the people that choose to learn more about a subject by coming together. I've written more about that in The Communities Manifesto.

 

 

The last of our 16 myths is that our intellectual property will be stolen. I remember many a discussion inside of companies that I've been at where they'll say, "We've got to lock down this content because some other part of our company will use it in the wrong way."

 

Here's an example of that. I was at a company in which we had a consulting division a field service division. The field service division was realizing that we needed new sources of revenue because maintenance was a declining revenue stream for computers. They believed we needed to get into new services. The consulting business then became wary: "If we publish any of our materials that we use to deliver services, this field service business is going to steal that and they'll go out and deliver those services and we'll lose revenue. Let's make sure that we make this successful only for consulting people."

 

Of course, that's not very realistic because a field service technician in possession of some project plan from a consultant is probably not likely to be able to go out and deliver that consulting service. What's more likely is that they'll come to the person that posted it and say, "I see that you posted this document. My customer wants to buy that. Can you help me deliver that?" The notion that you need to lock it down and secure it so that other people can't see it goes against the whole notion of knowledge management.

 

One of my more recent articles, "Open the Gates and Tear Down the Walls," looks at this notion of the private group or the lock-down content, and contrasts it with the notion of what we're all trying to do, which is get people to share and to be more open in that sharing. You have to step away from that and say, "Why are we doing that?" Sometimes we're going to prevent competitors from getting it or we're going to prevent disgruntled employees from getting it. There are legitimate reasons why you might be working in a project team which needs to limit access to the project team's content. That's fine, but that's a little bit different than some broader community or broader knowledge repository.

 

If you're encountering that view, step back from it and say, "Is there truly a risk that we're dealing with here or is it imaginary?" 

 

Those are the 16 myths of KM, described and debunked.