Proposal #6 - [Effective Knowledge Management] by Jim McGee

I want to tease out the implications of the following thesis:

The most effective starting point for knowledge management in the organization is at the front stoop of the individual knowledge worker. If you can help and support them to do more effective knowledge management locally, most of the challenges of top down knowledge management disappear and those that remain become manageable.

I was once the Chief Knowledge Officer of DiamondCluster International as we grew from 25 to over 1,000 consultants. Later I created and taught one of the first business school courses on the topic of knowledge management while on the faculty of the Kellogg School. That course required students to maintain their own blogs and marked the start of my public blogging at McGee's Musings in the fall of 2001. Those experiences were more often characterized by disappointment and failure than by unqualified success.

What is it that makes it so hard to move from the simple notion that we ought to manage something so manifestly important to organizations to effective practice? The problem with most approaches to knowledge management in organizations is that it starts from an unexamined assumption that knowledge management is somebody else’s problems.

The blinding flash of the obvious that struck me a when trying to get traction on yet another KM initiative was this. The “jerk” who wasn’t contributing materials to the KM system was me. Wrapped up in the moment of getting a deliverable out to a client I got it done and moved on to the next demand. Six months later, I can’t find the appropriate file on my own hard drive. If I can’t manage my own knowledge, why should I expect to be able to take advantage of other knowledge in the organization?

If you move to that level of analysis, it raises a series of interesting questions. How do you use knowledge in your own work? How do you or should you reuse work you’ve done in the past? What does it mean to do knowledge work efficiently? effectively? What problems do you have with managing your own knowledge that you have to fix personally and locally? How can you enlist others in helping you solve your KM problems? If you define and solve your personal KM problem, what doe that leave for the organization to solve? What should organizations do differently if they want to empower their knowledge workers to do a better job of personal knowledge management? How does that help the organization? Is technology part of the solution or part of the problem? While these are the kinds of questions I've been trying to explore on my blog and in my work, they need more space to get to a next set of insights.