Is Knowledge Management Really Dead?

To rework a rather famous misquote, reports of the demise of knowledge management (KM) are greatly exaggerated – though recent articles would have you believe otherwise.

Tom Davenport’s Wall Street Journal article “Whatever Happened to Knowledge Management?” says that KM is ‘gasping for breath’, while David Griffiths of K3-Cubed suggests that this isn’t even new and that in fact KM died off over 7 years ago: “Breaking old news! Knowledge Management is dead!”.

Are they right?  Let’s be clear, knowledge is as important to the success of businesses as ever.  However what was originally conceived as KM was never the right solution for managing knowledge within organizations. Document management, records management, enterprise search and so on have all been called KM solutions over the last 20 years but, as Tom Davenport’s article rightly says, failed to address some of the key challenges to making effective use of information - i.e. turning it in to knowledge.

So if the phrase 'knowledge management' is being used less these days then perhaps that's because it's finally being used correctly and is no longer an umbrella term for anything to do with storing or finding information. Successful knowledge management is about tackling three key issues:

1). providing concise, relevant information to people when & where they need it,

2). creating a healthy ecosystem for keeping your knowledge up to date, and

3). addressing the psychological barriers to sharing and using knowledge.

Technology can help address these challenges, but it's about more than features and functionality, it's about getting inside the heads of the users, understanding how they work and why. It's about leveraging analytics and cognitive computing alongside user experience and psychology to create a solution that predicts the answers a user needs and rewards them for sharing the answers they already know.

To me, this as an exciting time for knowledge management the focus is finally more on the 'knowledge' and less on the 'management', exactly where it should always have been.