I spent the best part of the last week in Columbus OH (decent weather, so-so food and service) at two back-to-back conferences, International Council for Knowledge Management (ICKM) and the annual ASIST bash. ICKM was an enjoyable new experience for me and while the schedule was punishing with 8am keynote addresses and almost as many parallel sessions as delegates during the day, I learned that KM is really struggling with the exact same problems as any other discipline of the information field. I spoke on Friday and used the occasion to push the “information accelerates discovery” message out to a new audience and I found them very receptive, being inundated afterwards for copies of my slides (which always makes me a little nervous, but….).
What I learned in two days convinced me that KM has more substance than I’d previously acknowledged, but also the same turf and status battles. Apparently some now argue KM is dead, replaced by Web 2.0 (as if!) and it’s time is over. Well imagine, a world where we don’t manage knowledge! I did learn some interesting tidbits such as the positive correlation between pharmaceutical firms success and their willingness to share info with their competitors (though I note with this that it’s correlational only — success might breed openness). The literature on KM seems difficult to get one’s arms around as it morphs into technology studies quickly or uses lots of terms you know to talk about slightly vague activities in organizations, but I’m working on it. There seems to be no end of stories of the KM role being handed to one person who is told to ‘get on with it’. Still, the complementary nature of KM to the information world in which our students reside suggests to me that we must look more seriously at this domain, and I intend to do so. Suggestions welcome.
I am so happy to see professionals acknowledge the vagaries of knowledge management and its terminology. As a KM masters student at OU-Tulsa I recently reached exactly these same conclusions. I too think there is something to KM but articles that pass as studies show merely correlations or worse, point to organizational initiatives with positive results and say “these must be KM.” In an effort to deal with the issues, I am putting together a repository of KM resources the first of which is a wiki designed to establish a KM vocabulary. The idea is to get acadmics and practitioners to contribute to the wiki in a way that generates definitions of terms and descriptions of actions. This is a small but important first step of a much larger initiative. I am sure my instrutor won’t mind you receiving a copy of the complete proposal and I would love for you to participate if you are interested.
Do it!! (and let us know)
I am, of course, “the instructor” Dennis mentions above, and was sorry that he couldn’t make it to Columbus as well. I look forward to learning more about the various Austin “discovery acceleration” information initiatives soon in Denver!
I’m taking Don Turnbull’s Knowledge Management Systems class this semester at UT’s School of Information. Here’s a link to our class blog: http://courses.ischool.utexas.edu/Turnbull_Don/2008/fall/INF_385Q/blog/