Wednesday 9 July 2008

Is KM Dead? Great video of Dave Snowden and Larry Prusak

This is a fantastic video, which actually hits the nail on the head about why "the dead keep walking" in terms of KM - that there's no clear practice community for KM, where people keep doing the same thing, not learning from experiences - quite scathing about government adoption of KM...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Good video interview about the transition of KM from management fad to an integral part of Social Computing (aka Social Media).

Video is a year old, but still timely -

Snowden is particularly insightful re: forces at work moving from highly structured, pre-codified taxonomies to the more 'organic aspects of knowledge that model human interaction.'

KM has long struggled as a practice area, for many reasons outlined in the interview -

But I agree with Prusak & Snowden, the core concepts remain important, and are showing up frequently in interactions where collaboration and business problems require it.

In short, KM practices are not dead, but the space is transforming to something broader and more dynamic. It will serve processes that are more integral to collaborative practices in a knowledge economy, what Snowden calls 'a flex period of social and natural science' or 'renaissance'.

Thanks for bringing this out of the archives.

Important perspectives.

Coordinator of the Printernet Project said...

Thank you for posting. I found you from a twitter link from "weknowmore".

I'm not a pro in KM, but it occurs to me that the crux of the matter is the "practice" community. Knowledge articulates into a structure when it is organized by the problem solver to focus on solving a proximate problem.

It's the multiplicity,time constrained and highly incented nature of real life problem solving that is the catalyst for taking from ongoing streams of knowledge to "make sense of it."

My interest is high school education. It seems that K -12 education could turn out to be a rich field for KM practice.

My guess is that is already probably being done, but it hasn't yet gotten on my radar.