It used to be that if I wanted something special, something that wasn’t in great demand by the consumer machine, that it would normally be impossible for me to find at the store. But not any more.
The web has grown so much that it’s now viable for businesses to make things they know only a small proportion of people will want — and when you’re in reach of consumers across the whole planet it makes perfect business sense. This is the long-tail.
And how do people find these ‘hard to find’ things in the long-tail? Well, they use modern search engines, but more recently, people find things through other people. People leave comments, blog about things, take photos of them, tag them, and share their finds with others. It’s this social layer that Web 2.0 has given us that now allows us to share what we find very easily. Time poor? Got no time to waste trying to find something in the mess of the web? Social computing tools, as Maria Murphy reminds us, help us get the job done.
But what if I’m an employee, not a consumer, looking for some quirky piece of information in the organisation somewhere?
In ages past, people used to sit around the fire in their bearskins and tell stories about the best place to hunt or the best place to find the juiciest berries. More recently we’ve had big machines that store lots of information, unfortunately, finding things inside it is often very hard. This is where KM comes in handy — that is, KM the discipline and not some self-proclaimed KM-system from the 90s.
Giving real knowledge management to an organisation is like giving Web 2.0 and social computing to the long tail.
When KM legends like Drucker and Snowden talk about Knowledge Management, it’s not about systems. Snowden has even blogged that an over-emphasis on technology has probably killed of KM in some areas. They talk of understanding the ways in which people share knowledge and information and giving organisations a helping hand so that people can point other people in to the juiciest bits of information — whether its inside someone’s head or on the company intranet.
There are, of course, some tools organisations can borrow from Web 2.0 that helps to make the task easy. Many people are crying out for these tools because they use them at home to share stuff with their friends and families and just expect now to be able to do the same at work. But be smart about it — it’s one thing to throw a wiki or a blog at an organisation, but it’s another to understand when one is appropriate and how to implement it successfully. Again, knowledge management has the answers.
So what are you doing for the long-tail inside your organisation?
M
12 December, 2007 at 8:35 am
Matt,
Spot on! I have always believed KM is about facilitation and enabling, rather than storage and technologies. It is the whole tacit/explicit knowledge dimension and how it is used and understood that counts.
Interestingly, before KM became a popular title, I worked in the business library of Bankers Trust Australia. I guess you could have described me as the research librarian back in the late 80’s-early 90’s. A key role I played was in linking people from different parts of the organisation so that they could leverage knowledge - I was a knowledge hub inside an organisation of silos. Naturally, legal separation was adhered to in required circumstances. As I was based in the library, and “neutral”, I was able to discover and understand nearly all parts of the organisation and had first-hand knowledge of who knew and did what. I thereby facilitated and enabled knowledge exchange within the organisation.
KM today pretty much tries to facilitate and enable the same interactions for knowledge sharing and information distribution, but on a far grander and more effecient scale.
So long as people remain the cornerstone of knowledge management, I think knowledge management still has an important contribution to play in business.
14 December, 2007 at 10:29 am
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