16 Knowledge Management Myths Debunked: Misconceptions of KM

KM Myth 6: Social Media is Frivolous

We've all heard the notion that social media is frivolous, social is not serious, or it's a waste of time. That's where we had discussion yesterday where one of the speakers said that you don't want to call your enterprise social network "Facebook for the enterprise." That's probably a good suggestion, because a lot of people will conjure up something different from work if you talk about social in that sense. Some people even say to avoid the word ìsocialî altogether. They'll tend to give you the example, "I don't care what you ate for breakfast."

I don't actually see a lot of posts about what people ate for breakfast. I don't think that's the primary use of social media, but that's a common lament. Once again, you have to get back to your use case and say, "No, we're not really talking about sharing what you ate for breakfast. We're really talking about these other uses that are valid and which social tools do better than other previous tools."

Then there's the notion of wasting time. I've even had cases where people have told me, "I was chastised for using the social network to post something and was told stop doing that and go back to work." We've got some work to do there if that's what's viewed as being wasting of time. I think you can turn that around and say, "What were you supposed to do instead?" The time that people spend on social networks if they're truly sharing useful information for the rest of the organization, if they're truly using it to ask and answer questions, we have to recognize them and celebrate that, and not make them think that somehow that's a waste of time.

KM Myth 7: Don't Control

In the community realm, we often get into a debate about whether we should try to control or not the creation of communities. There's not agreement on this. I have one position. There are other people that have opposing views. My own view is that there's actually value in trying to limit the number of communities that any organization has. There are a lot of reasons to do this, but the counter-argument is that we should let a thousand flowers bloom and use survival of the fittest. Let the need to be 100 different communities all focused on social media. One of them will emerge and that's the way it should be.

My own experience is, if you have 100 communities for social media, they'll all die. None of them will thrive. There won't be the survival of the fittest. There'll be the death of all of them. Why is that? It's because when someone tries to figure that out, and they say, "I want to go and learn about social media," they look to see the available communities and they're shown this bewildering list of, say, 10 communities to choose from, they'll just give up. They're not going to go pick one. They're going to give up or if they do pick one, they'll miss lots of other people that would've benefited from it or people that could've answered it.

The notion that we should allow there to be an infinite number of these things, in my experience doesn't work well. In this instance, itís better not to control everything.

But limited control has value. Get groups to combine. Keep your community such that it's easy for the user to figure out which one, to have a critical mass where all of them can be together. You should try to prevent redundant communities, but it's not because you're trying to make some kind of top-down authoritarian control. Rather, itís to respect your user to give them an8. E easy-to-understand environment where they know which community to join and all the people can reliably be expected to be in that community.

KM Myth 8: Eliminate Risks

Some companies are very sensitive to risks. I work at one of them, and there are plenty of other ones. They're concerned that we might somehow share information that we shouldn't share, information would be leaked somehow. In some cases, I've seen where they try to control all access to the outside world. Weíve had some instances where countries would say, "All access to social tools are blocked." Why was that? Because we're going to control leaking information that we don't want to leak.

If you had a social network and it was open, then you would be aware of it if such a thing was happening because you'd see it. It'd be visible. If you don't allow that, what happens? People do it some other way that you don't see. You can't prevent somebody from handing a piece of paper or sending an email or having a phone call or some other means. You can't necessarily control that. Yet you're saying, "If we block social media, that'll be the answer." It's actually better to encourage things to be shared where you can see them and they're visible, and if somebody does something inappropriate, you could then talk to them and take an intervention. Whereas if you drive it underground, it doesn't work.

My own view is to trust people to do no harm. It doesn't mean that people won't do harm. They may do it intentionally or unintentionally, but if they do it in such a way that you can see it, then you can counsel them and you can intervene. If you don't, that begs the question: If you don't trust people, why did you hire them? People are working for a company. You hire them. You entrust them with the work that they're doing. You should trust them to use good sense also when it comes to sharing information.

KM Myth 9: Be Like Google and Amazon

Have you ever been asked why your search isn't more like Google? We all know the reasons why people ask that. The reason it isn't has to do with scale and the difference between the millions of people on the internet and the thousands or hundreds of people in your company. But they still ask the question. You'll even have leaders who say, "Let's make our search just like Google."

The other one you'll sometimes hear is, "Let's have content ratings like Amazon." That's another one of those things that don't work well when they're not at scale. The number of people that actually rate things on Amazon isn't a very large number, but because there's so many people, it's large enough to matter.

Inside of a company, the percentage of people that might actually rate a document is tiny. Typically, what we see is there are only two types of people that would actually give a one-to-five-star rating on a document. The person who wrote it will give themselves five stars and someone else who had some ax to grind with them will give them one star. You won't get a useful rating. Why is that?

My own experience is that if I'm asked to come up with a five-star rating, it's hard. I have to struggle with is this three or four or five. I won't do it. I think that that's the wrong approach. It's better to ask simple questions such as, "Were you able to reuse this document?" That's a yes or no question. That's an easier one to answer. It's like the like button. If you click the Like button, you don't have to think too hard about it. You either like it or you don't. If you like it, you click Like. If you have to rate something one, two, three, four or five, you have to think about it. That's a different dynamic.

I like this approach better: "Click here if you were able to reuse this document." That's a very objective statement. You either were able to reuse it or you weren't. If one is clicked a lot like that, then you can say that's probably a document that you'll want to promote or have it higher in search results and that sort of thing. Think about how these things actually work behind firewalls inside of companies and treat them differently than saying this should just be like Google or just like Amazon.