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Sun, 5 September 2004
Intranets look vainly to knowledge management
The online magazine Line56 is running an article entitled "Intranet Trends to Watch For". As with most articles about intranets, it starts with the premise that intranets are valuable. From there, it goes on to predict that search tools will improve, that more employees will have to create intranet documents and that - here's the big one - knowledge management will at last become important.
The Line56 article interests me not because Line56 is a great authority but because it is typical of eveything I see about intranets and knowledge management. To quote the article:
The killer applications that replace the corporate telephone directory and the cafeteria menu will be knowledge management tools. Irrespective of your organization type, employees will perceive knowledge as a key mechanism to stay competitive with their peers and competitors. Effective knowledge management initiatives delivered via the intranet will take advantage of this trend. Furthermore, CEOs will treat employee productivity and knowledge levels as their only surviving competitive advantages as they attempt to limit the damage done by off shoring. Knowledge management tools will gain more prominence in this business environment and the corporate intranet will be the natural place to house them.
I have been watching the knowledge management boom for 15 years. I would love to belive that knowledge management was a valuable field. But to the extent that it's about capturing "knowledge" in documents, it goes against everything I know about successful organisations. Like artificial intelligence, it seems based on a mistaken idea about what knowledge is, and about how knowledge-based economies function. I've thrown my lot in with Peter Drucker, who knows all about knowledge-based economies but who famously declared that "you can't manage knowledge".
Take eChoice, the business where I work. We have lots of knowledge. It's all in people's heads, and it mostly won't come out. You could spend months interviewing the eChoice staff to find out what they know, and writing it down to create a sort of encyclopedia of the organisation. It would be an expensive waste of time. Barely anyone would read it, and they probably wouldn't recall it when they needed it.
Sharing knowledge takes effort and skill, even between two people talking face-to-face. You don't create that by writing stuff down; you create it by creating robust relationships that give people the confidence to ask questions and learn from each other, and by encouraging the disciplines of asking questions without wasting people's time, and of answering questions with clarity and power, of telling vivid stories within a shared value system. These are the things that matter, the things businesses need to be good at.
To the extent that this is knowledge management, knowledge management can be useful. But we have words already to describe this process: "teaching" and "learning". Teaching and learning should be core disciplines for any well-educated person, and organisations should work hard to encourage these skills.
But teaching and learning are not even inherently well-suited to digital media. At an individual level, this teaching and learning often happens best with the participants face-to-face or talking on the phone. if concepts need to be visualised, and pen and an A4 sheet of paper usually do the trick. And the digital media most often used for this sort of communication are email and instant messaging. Storing "knowledge" on an intranet is a poor substitute for real-time electronic exchanges, and an even poorer substitute for a yarn over a meal or a cup of coffee.
So here comes a massive generalisation with an extra dose of arrogance. The "knowledge management" industry seems to appeal to people with a natural bent for neatness and completeness, people who believe that if we could only capture all the knowledge then everyone would know what to do. It appeals to the librarian mentality. And this mentality is a natural response to the chaos of real knowledge. But it is nevetheless dangerous in a business environment which must value creativity and proactivity.
At eChoice, we have an intranet. Frankly, it needs a couple of days' work to neaten and straighten it. But the only bits I can actually bring myself to recommend spending time on are:
- The staff telephone directory. As far as I can tell, this is the one intranet feature that everybody wants. Names, numbers, photographs, areas of expertise all add value quickly.
- An index of links to business-critical Web-based applications. (Many of these apps might be classed as "intranet" applications, but they are in fact simply reporting and management apps that happen to run as Java applets communicating with our corporate database. They could just as easily be native Windows programs hooked into the same database.)
- A list of logos and other brand elements that people can copy into their own documents.
- Documentation of a few standard procedures, practices, rules and guidelines. (In organisations that truly value documented guidelines, intranets can be highly cost-effective. Governments, legal practices, work safety divisions can all probably make good use of intranets in many situations. But guidelines and procedures are not what most people mean by "knowledge management".)
Now there's a sensible argument in favour of tidying this system up at the edges: poor implementation in one part of the organisation sends a message that the organisation will accept sloppiness elsewhere. But there's no real business case for expanding our intranet. In particular, there's no real case for the sort of knowledge management initiatives that so excite Line56 and its ilk.
