Why knowledge management will become irrelevant

KM is among the key buzzwords in the enterprise space today and more and more organisations are using KM and hiring knowledge managers. Yet, Akhil K Shahani feels that as the Internet-driven New Economy catches on, KM will become irrelevant

Do you recall the end of the 1980s where every manufacturing company worth its salt was implementing ‘Quality Assurance’ initiatives and Quality Consultants made a killing? You do not see much of that today. Why? Is it because companies have abandoned the concept of quality? No. It’s just that in the past decade, the concepts and practices of creating high quality products have become ingrained into the daily workflow of organisations. Employees are no longer aware of quality as a distinct ‘practice’.

Similarly, I would like to hypothesise that the wholen concept of ‘Knowledge Management’ will slowly become similarly entrenched. Knowledge managers are likely to be the ladder that is thrown away after getting organisations to New Economy readiness.

Digital divides

The so-called Digital Divide is much more than a gap in access to technology or IT know-how. There is a profound generational gap growing in the workplace between the Internet-influenced relatively young people and those that grew up or are still growing up in a pre-connected world. The two generations perceive reality very differently. The opportunities of the New Economy landscape are much more visible to the network culture generation where the pre-Internet older workers supervisors and managers see only confusion, challenge and risk. The differences between the two generations play themselves out in distinctive and opposing workplace behaviour. The interesting thing about this for knowledge management is that many of these behaviour patterns consist of knowledge behaviour.

If you look at this behaviour carefully you will see two things. First, the behaviour of the Net generation worker is pretty closely aligned to the productive behaviour of the New Economy organisation—stressing open networks rather than closed structures, collaboration rather than competition, innovation rather than standardisation, flexible approaches to rapid formation, disbanding and reforming of project-oriented teams; as such they are pretty much tuned into current needs already. If there are tensions in an organisation that is making a transition to a New Economy model and process those tensions are internal to the Old Economy heads or between the Old Economy ‘senior’ staff and the newer, less experienced but more perceptive Net generation workers.

You should also see that the preoccupations of knowledge managers over the past few years have been distinctively on the Old Economy side of the Digital Divide. It’s a striking realisation because we associate the rise of knowledge management (KM) with the rise of New Economy organisations.

However, the discipline has been defined by predominantly Old Economy concerns. Insofar as knowledge management can be called a skilled profession, its skills have been derived variously from the skills and tools used in library information, science data systems design and (arguably) consulting. Few knowledge managers started their careers as ‘Net-heads’—most of them grew up in a TV and newspaper culture and had their formative working induction in structured bureaucratic and not KM-compliant organisations. We can hardly be blamed for obsessing about Old Economy issues while the Net generation look on amused.

Also, the two principal concerns of knowledge management over the past five years have been knowledge collection and access and promoting collaborative knowledge sharing cultures. These are actually distinctively Old Economy concerns—or more precisely the concerns of Old Economy heads when challenged by New Economy changes. Collaboration is not an issue for Net generation workers—collaboration and open knowledge sharing is the bedrock of Internet culture: you don’t need systems to promote collaboration simply because it is taken for granted. The tools for collaboration are pretty useful but when non-collaboration-trained Old Economy heads design or commission them they end up as emasculated versions of what the Net-heads design. Knowledge or data aggregation is a relic of a generation that grew up when information was scarce and cost money. We hoard knowledge in vast databases, knowledge-bases and warehouses as if the world were going to end tomorrow and we cast about the confusing New Economy landscape to find out how we can possibly make money from it.

What then will knowledge management for a New Economy generation look like? It’s a fair bet that three key trends will emerge over the next five to ten years as Internet-cultured workers ascend the scale of experience and seniority.

From aggregation to access

The focus of both technology and techniques will shift from aggregation of data information and knowledge and move towards an emphasis on access to information data and knowledge irrespective (and uncaring) of where it is. Crawling search engines and intelligent personal search agents with strong navigation and hunting skills will dominate the traditional functions of storing, categorising and giving access to knowledge objects. Open standards in knowledge object labelling will become a more important issue than ownership of knowledge objects. Knowledge possession will still be an important function of the firm but it will be a highly defined function focused on defensible intellectual property.

From information to time

The focus of knowledge workers will shift from seeing information and knowledge as their primary resource to seeing time as their primary resource. Information plenitude has not yet destroyed our Old Economy perceptions of information as a precious resource. The newer generation takes this more easily for granted and worries only about the time they have to find to deploy and create value from the right knowledge. Tools technologies and corporate initiatives will focus much more on three areas of concern:

• Reducing time-to-knowledge (through broadband technologies, clearer differentiation and definition of synchronous/asynchronous communication conventions, wireless technology and more powerful access engines).
• Increasing time-to-action (as the Net generation matures ‘quality thinking’ time will emerge as a prime asset to be achieved by reducing time-to-knowledge and simplifying or compressing incidental or peripheral communications).
• Expanding time-leverage by more sophisticated delegation-collaboration tools and techniques such as jigsaw meetings, distributed decision-making consensus and difference-sensing technologies.

From tools to skills

We have already reached a stage where the technological tools we have built enable us to do far more than we have the physical or mental capability to process. The next five years will see a more intensive focus on defining and propagating the skills and conventions we use in virtual communication and knowledge exchange interaction, with knowledge engines of various sorts and gaining time-leverage over our activities.

The dissolution of knowledge management

The movement of KM thinking has to be in the direction of social capital. It is an inevitable consequence of a focus on human and intellectual capital together with the work done on fostering collaborative communities of practice and tacit knowledge sharing. Social capital is the next big thing to hit KM simply because it defines and promises to quantify the assets a firm must have in terms of the components of relationship-building, trust, influence, co-operation and leadership within its culture, its environments and its systems.

But extrapolating beyond an immediate expansion of interest in social capital and how it works within firms there is another necessary journey we must make to satisfy the final equation. Just as Peter Senge and his colleagues found that they could not pursue the goal of defining and supporting the learning organisation without first going backwards to the challenges of organisational change so the social capitalists will start with relationships and they will end with systems. It is the firm’s structural capital that defines and supports all of the ‘soft’ knowledge capital a firm has within its sphere of influence. It is the structural capital input (in terms of pay and reward performance management and support recruitment and induction hierarchies and titles, ways of doing things, standards and procedures and codified values and goals) that feeds and influences everything intangible that happens in a firm’s tacit knowledge sphere: from innovation to human capital to customer capital to social capital.

Conversely, on the output side of the equation it is the design of the structural capital that defines an organisation’s effectiveness in extracting either direct value or explicit knowledge out of the rich chemical ferment taking place within its ‘soft’ knowledge base.

Hence, not long after the peak in interest in social capital the pundits must return to a knowledge-based analysis of structural capital—the pipeline that provides inputs to the soft knowledge processes of a firm but which also extracts value from that very process. But hold on, isn’t structural capital suspiciously similar to the prime activity areas of a respectable discipline hitherto known as human resources?

Approaching this puzzle from a different angle, let’s look at the latest global initiative to help organisations move quickly into New Economy mode: E-learning. It is a vastly immature and highly fragmented industry—not even pedagogy can

claim maturity or proven authority. But within the tools, techniques, better practices and programmes we see KM tools and KM offerings more frequently—and they do not look out of place. The fact is that e-learning in its very connectedness and time-independence transforms the role of organisational education from an Old Economy push-model into a New Economy pull-model. Once we have worked out the tricks and techniques to overcome the inadequacies of the medium and once we actually make our content attractive and effective we will suddenly and unexpectedly be closer to Senge’s dream of the learning organisation simply because technology allows us.

When you look at this more closely you realise that learning within organisations must inevitably become:

• Pervasive;
• Multiple channel and adaptive, catering to flexible needs, preference and styles;
• Surrounded by an environment of related knowledge so as to ensure learning is expansive rather than restrictive;
• Social supported by communication and collaboration tools;
• Heavily influenced by project and team-based models;
• Hybrid moving between real and virtual contact with peers, coaches, facilitators and authorities.

The traditional focus on learning in the organisation has of course been the training function normally directed from within the human resource sphere. As e-learning and hybrid learning become more pervasive—partly because technology allows it and partly because Net generation workers demand continuous and diverse learning offerings—then the training function will diminish both in profile and resourcing. At the very least it will become a minor adjunct of the organisation’s learning and knowledge strategy; at most it will dissolve completely into a broader learning sphere that will range from coaching, on-the-job training, induction performance, adaptive learning, delivery work redesign, decision support and project learning cycles to what are currently defined as knowledge management practices and competency planning.

Notice that KM too is merely one distributed ingredient in the New Economy organisation’s learning space. At best, like the training function it will be a minor but still defined component in the overall organisational learning landscape. More probably it will disappear almost totally with perhaps residual traces in a role that plays custodian to the firm’s defensible intellectual property.

We need not be too sad about this. Before they completely pass, knowledge management and knowledge managers would have played a critical role in helping Old Economy organisations and Old Economy heads make a transition at least part-way into a new world of work and a new world of value creation. As New Economy human talent becomes more influential in the workplace, first generation concerns of knowledge management will give way to more mature projects around the creation of value from knowledge. Ultimately, knowledge management as a discipline and knowledge managers as actors must disappear from the corporate stage, gracefully or otherwise.

Akhil K Shahani is director of Ajax Knowledge Systems. He can be contacted at akhils@ajax.co.in