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Knowing
Organizations: How Content Publishing is Shaping
Corporate Culture |
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20 October
2003 |
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This year's KMWorld & Intranets 2003 Conference
evidenced a level of acceptance of Knowledge Management
concepts that seems to point towards both great success and
a transition away from KM being a major factor in shaping
content technology. Effective content publishing
technologies are now becoming ubiquitous in major
organizations, with - and oftentimes without - knowledge
management as a prime driving factor. Knowledge
Management's contributions to the human side of
organizations will continue to be significant, but it's
publishing that is driving the most significant changes to
corporate culture. |
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Although we have moved comfortably
into the 21st century, much of the corporate world still owes
its structure and culture to management concepts laid down in
the 19th century. Hierarchy, militaristic management and highly
centralized information collection are tenets that were
captured in the classic 1950's study
The Organization Man, which documented the then
state-of-the-art management techniques that helped to win World
War II via efficient mass production and that helped to
transform the world of consumer goods in the post-war era. In
the early days of the computer era, the emphasis on information
production was conceived along similar lines: high efficiency,
high volume, high centralization. The Web came along and
changed much of the human face of content production, but the
culture and structure of major organizations has struggled to
keep pace with the one-to-one communication capabilities
enabled by history's biggest
party line.
As evidenced at last week's The KMWorld & Intranets 2003 Conference,
though, it appears as if the tide has begun to turn fairly
convincingly in favor of new forms of organizational thinking
and investment that are beginning to favor the capabilities of
the Web-based content publishing capabilities that service KM
concepts. For years Knowledge Management has floundered on the
inability of technology to transform its tenets of creating
knowing organizations from theory to bankable reality - in part
because the centralized publishing cultures that had dominated
the institutions trying to implement KM systems made it
impossible for individuals to communicate with each other
cost-effectively, and in part because the organizations
implementing those systems were skeptical about the potential
benefits of massive I.T. investment for touchy-feely
communication goals. What this conference made clear,
though, is that both necessity and opportunities are helping to
push the Organization Man content culture to the sidelines and
clear the way for effective KM implementation. Here are a few
of the major factors that seem to be shaping the trends towards
real Knowledge Management - and really effective institutional
publishing cultures:
- Government requirements are driving
institutional content rationalization. Corporate
governance requirements and responses to terrorism threats
have compelled major institutions to get a much more
encompassing and authoritative grip on what they publish and
on the content that they consume. Meeting these requirements
has resulted in an information infrastructure providing the
high level of content tracking, persistence and organization
that is a prerequisite for many Knowledge Management
concepts, while preserving a large degree of freedom in how
people create, publish, view and manage content. In other
words, without responding directly to Knowledge Management
requirements, much of what's required to implement Knowledge
Management-friendly content storage and management
infrastructure is becoming a commonplace requirement for
doing day-to-day business. Certainly KM concepts are imbedded
in much of this compliance-oriented infrastructure, but the
sell was for the most part not a KM sell.
- They built it and they came.
While Web portals and other Internet-related content
technologies developed for major institutions are still
maturing in many ways, this year's conference made it clear
that third and fourth generation Web infrastructure has
already created a pervasive publishing and content sharing
culture in many institutions that is meeting many of the
practical goals of KM, with or without the KM label. Weblogs
and instant messaging, for example, are becoming increasingly
important publishing tools in many strategic and tactical
settings in major institutions, tools that owe little to
Knowledge Management, but feed directly into the creation of
a highly dynamic grass-roots knowledge base. Effective search
engine technologies are fairly pervasive in most
institutions, now, allowing content to flow to those
that require it without huge investments in highly
centralized storage systems. While there is always room for
chaos in the highly distributed world of Web publishing, the
benefits of enabling individuals within institutions to have
easily heard publishing voices has created a publishing
culture that in many ways has become far more sophisticated
than most KMers would ever have dreamed of even three years
ago. While KM will continue to inform that culture,
publishing by highly networked individuals already has a life
of its own that will help organizations to discover value in
its content intuitively and organically through the
publishing process itself.
- KM was never about IT in the first
place. With many of the benefits of KM thinking already
incorporated into organizations' infrastructures, unwittingly
or otherwise, it was clear at the conference that KM now has
many of the levers in place to address the changes to
institutional culture that were always at the heart of the
movement from its inception. If the market advantage will go
to those institutions that know how to transfer knowledge
easily and effectively from those that have it to those that
need it, and the technological means to do that are in place,
then the only other advantage that can be honed is in how
people use those tools and other techniques effectively. The
calls for a knowledge sharing culture are really just a part
of a much more broad change to management culture that is
moving institutions away from their Organization Man roots
towards far more natural and effective methods of human
organization and communication. KM will never fade away
altogether from the content technology arena, but its real
contributions are going to be in shaping the management
habits and techniques of people who use publishing technology
more than the technology itself.
What will this conference look like a
year from now? If Knowledge Management is simply becoming
another way of saying "Business Analysis" or "Process
Improvement" or some other broad facet of management science,
the time may have come for KM to be treated as but one factor
shaping the value of institutional culture that relies on
publishing to express its changing essence. It is the act of
publishing, not knowledge, that is driving institutions forward
into a new era of productivity and human relations. It is in
publishing that people are investing, and in publishing culture
that the most important organizational changes are evidencing
themselves. Having a Knowing Organization is highly important,
but it is the Publishing Organization that turns the concept of
knowledge into a tangible asset.
-
John Blossom
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