OBSERVATIONS ON KM: Past, Present, and Future

How people communicate, not just at work, but also in their personal lives, has changed as well. Think of all those ubiquitous smart phones, which are used as recording devices for images and video as much as, if not more than, they are used as actual phones. The phrase “I talked to” often means a text or an email rather than a verbal interchange. People seamlessly move from one communication format to another.

The implications of multiple communication avenues extend to businesses as well. A customer may well contact a company via a website, gain clarity via email, switch to a phone call, and end up moving back to email. The pattern will vary depending on the information need. Similarly, inside of an organization, employees have several different communication possibilities as well as more than one app at their disposal.

Having various communication tools available encourages collaboration, a notion central to KM and in line with the thinking of younger generations entering the workforce. Collaboration extends thinking beyond departmental boundaries.

The sudden shift to remote working caused by the pandemic was, perhaps ironically, a vindication of KM principles. It proved the necessity of access to a centralized body of information, a single source of truth, as a vital component of people’s ability to be productive. Collaboration became virtual, as did almost every other aspect of life. It sparked a rush toward digital transformation since employees could no longer visit a physical file cabinet. They needed the knowledge regardless of where it was stored and they needed it in digital form.

One related advance in technology, as pointed out by Art Murray in his The Future of the Future column, is cloud computing. He also mentions crowd-sourcing, as evidenced by external sites such as Galaxy Zoo, which can have analogs within organizations and certainly involves interdisciplinary interactions.

Storage growth

Alongside cloud computing is the growth in bandwidth, allowing for storage at much higher levels. We used to think in terms of megabytes and gigabytes—which may still be what people store on their personal computers’ hard drives—but at an enterprise level, storage is more likely to be in terabytes, petabytes, and exabytes. It won't be that long before it's zettabytes and yottabytes.