Knowledge management in the age of Web 2.

0
From a focus on stocks of knowledge in repositories to activation and leveraging of relationships From stocks of knowledge to participation in flows Do organizations still have a role to play in the networked economy where everyone can essentially become their own agent? ICT provides the infrastructure for interaction of identities, enabling new models of knowledge activation The future will see more organizational identities interacting in web 2.0 ways If knowledge can be seen as a process, not an objective, then let knowledge management become a journey, not a destination

Knowledge Management in the age of Web 2.0

From a focus on stocks of knowledge in repositories to activation and leveraging of relationships

Command China versus Network China ran a recent op-ed in the New York Times by columnist Thomas Friedman. Friedman described how two parallel Chinas view information through two very different lenses. With the future fast inclined to favour Network China: a fluid variety of stakeholders and businesses generating information and participating together in very diverse, high value flows of business knowledge through sophisticated techniques. The juxtaposition holds many lessons for knowledge management in general. From stocks of knowledge to participation in flows Approaches to knowledge management in the past century emphasized collecting, organizing and subsequent marketing of stocks of knowledge. This involved repositories like databases, wikis, libraries, knowledge institutes, etc. Amass and make available. You come to me. The abundance of information on the internet and ever better retrieval systems such as search engines, means that access will become less and less a factor on the critical path to value creation. Information are meaningful facts, knowledge is the capacity to implement such information. Information is everywhere. Finding better ways to implement quickly and effectively in the relevant settings will be the key to unlock competitive value. I come to you. Two examples help illustrate the difference: 1) Did you ever experience a bizarre software glitch at home with your computer or phone and searched online to find a solution? Forums and FAQs abound to point you to an answer. This will help you work out the problem in due course, but how more helpful it would be if someone could just help you there and then with your specific problem and solve it. 2) My early career days started as an officer in the royal navy. When choosing teammembers, I always preferred someone with a brain over someone who only knew where to find and apply the checklist. Information without application does not bring results. And a new situation was never quite the same as the one which had precipitated the checklist in the past. As the rate of technological driven change in the world becomes ever faster, the half life of knowledge is becoming shorter. Institutions that are gearing up for a future that is like the past will likely become an anachronism in this age of ever more rapidly changing circumstances. We are moving to a world where the strategic advancement of whole industries shifts from the focus on stocks of knowledge in domains to the facilitation of effective participation in flows of knowledge and value creation.

Mike Brantjes, Worknets.com

Knowledge Management in the age of Web 2.0

From a focus on stocks of knowledge in repositories to activation and leveraging of relationships

To keep focusing knowledge management on ways to better capture and organize knowledge instead of trying to facilitate communities of practice, may well be viewed as trying to shift the proverbial deckchairs on the Titanic. ICT provides the infrastructure for interaction of identities, enabling new models of knowledge activation ICT reduces interaction costs dramatically between people, between organizations and within organizations. Especially social media produces digital infrastructures which facilitate effective participation, mobilizing individuals to create new value together. Cloud computing provides the means to deliver shared data and applications anywhere simultaneously. No longer invest enormous sums in proprietary, but soon outdated, dedicated systems, but pay relatively low fees to participate in open, community maintainable, infrastructure. These media allow people and institutions to A) establish relations with others who may posses relevant contributions and B) engage them to contribute at the critical moment. Just like the what you know may decline in relevance, the value of who you know will tilt towards an emphasis on what you learn or gain from who you know. Contacts themselves are of limited value. Merely creating reach for the sake of obtaining new contacts brings little use. Piles of business cards in rolodexes, many unused contacts on Linked-In or de-friending on Facebook attest to this. The real question becomes how to create relevance & richness from contacts. How to collaborate and make more from one another in a mutually beneficial relationship. This is where the difference between networking and worknetting kicks in. A network is a group, defined by its collection of members. A worknet however has a purpose, as a community of practice, with a common goal as its core defining principle. A worknet allows its members to participate in knowledge flows as it offers the worknet a place to activate knowledge. The success of a network is measured by the size of its membership or standing of its members. The success of a worknet is determined by what gets done together. Worknets allow participants to find common ground in trusted environments which are relevant to its members. Within an ecology where worknets can interconnect. And with the security that access to these worknets can be regulated so sharing of knowledge can take place where a positive pay-off is likely. Pay-off does not necessarily have to be monetary. Currently many knowledge management (and reporting systems) try to persuade participants through rules and regulation to contribute to knowledge domains, offering penalties for non-compliance. Often as a parallel activity on top of the actual work being done.

Mike Brantjes, Worknets.com

Knowledge Management in the age of Web 2.0

From a focus on stocks of knowledge in repositories to activation and leveraging of relationships

But real talent often joins a company, a community, because they feel they can learn not just earn. Use this as a way to shape an exchange of knowledge. In great companies facilitating continuous learning of employees has become a central tenet. More and more this tenet will move from an intracompany also to inter-company settings. Enabling such inter-company communities, worknets, to express which contribution was valuable, allows both functional or emotional rewards to be applied. Credits for remuneration or badge value by star ratings. sympathy, trust, validation, request for future cooperation, the furthering of collective interest and the opportunity for self-expression are rewards which have time and again proven their worth. In Network China everyone seems busy learning and improving together. Worldwide there are many geo-agglomerations where very specific business clusters thrive because businesses can feed on each other whilst enhancing their collective competiveness. Their common geography provided them with relatively low interaction costs between them. With ICT now driving down transaction and interaction costs anywhere, geo-clusters may give way to clusters along other dimensions, like language, affiliation, alumni or even heritage as in Diaspora. Do organizations still have a role to play in the networked economy where everyone can essentially become their own agent? The benefits of leveraging outside expertise applies to countries and regions as well as institutions and individuals. After all, there are always many more smart people and there is more knowledge outside any organization then there is inside. The more any company or institution can connect with sources of knowledge and leverage those connections, the more it will thrive. One could argue that the concept of organization as an administrative entity will disappear. In the past the cost of interaction within the boundary of an organization used to be much lower then the cost of interaction outside an organization. Common processes, trust, shared IT- infrastructure etc. provides an organization as an administrative entity with a cost advantage. This advantage is disappearing as ICT is lowering transaction- and interaction costs everywhere. Does that mean the end of the big organization? No, because as relations become more and more important, organizations offer a way to bundle, leverage and scale up relations beyond the possibility of any one individual. An individual may easily maintain a hundred or so relations, but the meaningfulness tapers off. An organization can institutionalize relations to a point where many individuals cannot. Thus the real lens to view organizations in the future is not as a legal entity residing within four walls under a roof, but as a set of relations and the ability to leverage the capabilities its talent represents according to circumstances. Rather then think of organizations as entities controlling knowledge with the lowest administrative costs, think of them as a way to effectively organize and enable communities of practice, delivering Mike Brantjes, Worknets.com

Knowledge Management in the age of Web 2.0

From a focus on stocks of knowledge in repositories to activation and leveraging of relationships

and enabling agents of change. Talent, after all, isnt someone with an extraordinary amount of knowledge, it is about being able to deliver difference, creators, innovators, solutionistas. The future will see more organizational identities interacting in web 2.0 ways Current social media, like Facebook, Twitter or MSN-live, provide infrastructures which facilitate interaction, especially social interaction, amongst identities representing individuals. It allows people to express themselves. The next phase in online infrastructure will allow organizations to interact, participate and essentially get a digital life. After all, much of organizational behavior is not unlike human behavior. Organizations have an inclination to survive, a requirement to interact professionally and ethically, a desire to express themselves, a need to be part of larger communities. But the virtual world has so far focused mostly on facilitating the interaction between people as individuals or focused on providing company-centric infrastructures like intra- and extra-nets. To fully realize collaborative potential, companies must be able to reach out across their borders and be able to deploy talent elsewhere. Participate in worknets under their own identity. Many processes depend for their end result on a chain of multi-stakeholder contributions in which not just individuals, but also institutions like municipalities, businesses, NGOs, etc. participate. It is here that new data models will provide their benefits. Such datamodels will allow organizations to involve themselves, independent of which individual fulfils a specific function in that organization at any one time. In the real world an organization may sponsor an event, and wants to maintain that relation irrespective of who executes the account management at any one time. The same applies to the virtual world, but current social networks do not cope properly with such relationship requirements. If knowledge can be seen as a process, not an objective, then let knowledge management become a journey, not a destination Just like a focus on innovation for innovations sake does not by it self produce innovation (only a solid focus on ever better serving stakeholders does) so will a focus on knowledge management for knowledge sake generate little real impact. The purpose of knowledge management is not more storage and retrieval, it is creation and application. This requires a change of focus from knowledge as static to knowledge activation as a process. From owning knowledge domains to enabling communities of practice, talent pools, worknets. There are many pitfalls along the way. Any process attracting and applying talent can go wrong in a thousand ways. To try to deterministically pre-empt these pitfalls before starting off takes an extraordinary amount of resources requiring control and overview more reminiscent of a dictatorial state. Mike Brantjes, Worknets.com

Knowledge Management in the age of Web 2.0

From a focus on stocks of knowledge in repositories to activation and leveraging of relationships

The institutional impulse is often still to capture knowledge and label as mine which is the bean counters view of the world. Knowledge often still is a source of power. Control may offer a sense of security, but not security itself as the real security comes from creating more value from the knowledge then anybody else. Which requires taking the open and sharing approach to knowledge instead of closing like a clam. Command China becomes Worknet China. Pooling talent in transient clusters, platforms, alliances, joint ventures and supply chains shows that there is another model beyond hoarding stocks of knowledge. Encourage participants to gather amongst themselves in an ad hoc fashion to address unexpected performance challenges and pull in outsiders as needed. Adaptation will take time. Many knowledge management systems focused on capturing and institutionalizing the knowledge of a firm or an industry. What we dont need now is build more capture mechanisms. What we really need to invest in are the infrastructures which generate and deliver knowledge in the spaces between organizations. Knowledge management strategies thus become collaboration strategies. From a corporate perspective, this may increasingly determine the focus of the knowledge management department, rather then leave such matters to the IT staff or the marketing department. Do knowledge sharing processes happen by themselves like automated slot machines may generate money once you enter a coin and pull the handle? Of course not. Activities online often need to be coached and managed forward as much as they do off line. Orchestrators, sparkers, gardeners, moderators, funders, lurkers, there are many different new roles, with responsibilities and rights to be attached accordingly. The next few years will vastly expand the vocabulary and possibilities of online professional interaction. This will be an exciting part of the future of knowledge management. And it will long remain a work in progress.

About the author and credits Mike Brantjes is a spirited innovator who aims to go beyond watching trends or understanding the drivers of change, to also realizing new ways of working together in this age of digital fierceness. After many years with McKinsey and The Boston Consulting Group he headed for the internet and social entrepreneurship. He is founder of The Worknet Institute and realizes Worknets.com together with STB, The Netherlands. The writing in this article has been especially inspired by the reading of Thomas Friedman, John Hagel, John Seely Brown, Edward de Bono and Yochai Benckler. More info also on www.theworknetinstitute.org Creative Commons License applies. Copy freely but please give credit where credit is due.

Mike Brantjes, Worknets.com