Nicholas Carr's recent book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains touches on an issue that APQC has been grappling with for several years--namely, that knowledge management is limited by the capacity of human attention, which many claim is being damaged by digital immersion, or excessive exposure to digital media.

One thing that hasn't changed with the onset of the Internet is the capacity of our short-term memories. According to research conducted by George A. Miller in the 1950s, an individual's short-term memory can hold only seven small "chunks" of information at a time, plus or minus two. If you use memory tricks to expand the size of each chunk, then you can increase the amount of information you can recall later, but that doesn't affect how much is in your short-term memory at any one time. It's still just seven chunks. No amount of technology can change that limitation.

In other words, your brain is like a big retail store. You have a massive amount of room in the warehouse, which is your long-term memory and knowledge, but there is very limited counter space, or short-term memory where conscious thought can take place. Whether you are pulling stuff out of the warehouse (using what you know) or shuffling things around on the counter (trying to multitask), your limitations are far greater than you think. Your mental counter space is small, and stuff is always falling off. You become aware of this when you walk into a room and can't remember why you came (because some other thought knocked the reason off the counter). And although multitasking may save time, experts say it can be draining on your brain's resources. As Laura Vanderberg, assistant director of the Time Management Consulting Program at Tufts University, points out, "It's 'mental counter space' and there's only so much of it."

Why does this matter to knowledge management? Because KM approaches should be designed with the assumption that people can't remember everything they know or once knew ("I don't know what I know until you ask me, and even then, I may have forgotten"). We need to capture information and lessons learned when they are fresh and make that knowledge available to others when and where they need it. KM exists because every employee can't know or remember everything, and our tools need to recognize that fact.

The thrill of being headhunted to a senior role in a successful, knowledge-intensive corporation on the basis of expertise is only balanced by the downside of finding yourself trapped in a cycle of ritualized meetings, unable to influence the strategic direction of the organization that paid the recruiter so well to recruit you.

In such a situation, several options become available:

1. Lie back and enjoy the management cycle of activity (like pedaling a static exercise bike with minimal resistance).
2.  Get upset about the fact that you have become a corporate adornment who can't influence strategy, become cynical, and constructively dismiss yourself.
3. Try to understand the situation and do something about it.

 Next Thursday, I will be facilitating APQC's knowledge management community call, where I will talk about why it's so hard for subject matter experts and thought leaders to put their knowledge to work inside "sticky" organizations. If this is a topic that interests you, please post your comments and feedback here, and join me on the upcoming call.

Victor Newman is a visiting professor of knowledge and innovation management at the Business School, The University of Greenwich. He will be the guest facilitator at APQC's June knowledge management community call, which will take place on Thursday, June 17, at 10:30 a.m. Central time. Click here to register for this free call.

APQC's 15^th KM conference is next week, and if the registration is any indication, knowledge management is alive and well, and travel budgets are being released from their chokeholds. This conference is always a bellwether for The Next Big Thing in KM.  We'll have to wait until next week to be sure, but my sense from talking with the keynoters and presenters is that there are two hot top-of-mind topics right now.

The first is how KM can help (rather than simply lament) today's socially networked, information-overloaded knowledge workers with their digitally induced shrinking attention spans, their iPhone/BlackBerry obsessions, and their perception that they don't have time to stop and "do KM." This includes discovering unexpected applications of Enterprise 2.0 tools to enliven communities of practice;  finding the right way to incorporate Facebook-type functionality in a business setting; using analytics to make sense out of human behavior;  and finding the "KM app for that" for mobile devices. If Apple can have a 474 percent increase in Asian sales of the (three-year-old!) iPhone and its biggest non-holiday profit EVER, then you know KM better pay attention to what will go on that tiny little Apple appliance. Or Droid. Or Blackberry. All while keeping the bad guys from getting a peak at it.

The second Big Thing is a deeper desire to understand the roots of real knowledge and wisdom.  Good heavens--dare we go there?  American KMers often fear we will be dismissed as academic or irrelevant to business if we talk about things like wisdom or judgment. Hmm... How's that working for us?  We'll see next week if there is traction to be found there.

Every year, I swear that the content and camaraderie at the conference couldn't get any better, but it does. This year should be no different. See you there.

Over the past year, APQC's internal Web technology team has been designing our next-generation Web presence. I say "presence" because our site is the primary outward-facing point of contact to our members, and many have come to equate access to our online Knowledge Base with APQC membership. Based on comprehensive feedback from our members and customers, we evaluated everything from well-known portal and content management system (CMS) vendors to this week's "Web 2.0 tool du jour," ultimately selecting Drupal as the platform best suited to our needs.

For those unfamiliar with Drupal, it's often categorized as an open source CMS, although the term "CMS" doesn't do it justice in terms of functionality. Drupal has a large and rapidly expanding install base, ranging from small, independent sites to large enterprises such as www.whitehouse.gov and www.fastcompany.com. From a knowledge management perspective, the most fascinating aspect of Drupal is the collaborative way in which the platform's programming community handles innovation. In return for access to more than 5000 contributed modules centrally organized at www.drupal.org, developers are on the honor system to contribute any generic modules they write that they feel will benefit the community as a whole. The community then offers feedback, bug reports, and feature patches.

I want to remind everyone that APQC's April 2010 knowledge management community call is coming up this week. The call will feature guest presenter Linda Hummel, knowledge management leader at GE Energy, and her colleague Dave Cerrone.

Since GE Energy's KM program was created in the second quarter of 2008 to support the company's sales and marketing team, the KM team has focused on the program's four pillars: people, process, content, and technology. Hummel and Cerrone will describe:

• how the foundation for the KM program was established with an emphasis on Google enterprise search,
  
• how GE Energy is taking people search to a new level with an expert locator system,
• how the KM team is measuring its success, and
• what processes are used to maintain content freshness and fill gaps.

This call will take place this Thursday, April 15, at 10:30 a.m. Central. You can register for the call at https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/469076536.

In the interest of transparency, let me just say up front that the folks I'm helping to publicize below are clients of mine. There are two good reasons why I'm happy to help them out: 1) what they do is pretty cool, and 2) I figure that, if I want to keep them as clients, I'd better do this because they asked me to.

What does Carrier Team One do? They share knowledge, transfer good practices among projects, and help create a collaborative, networked environment (in an otherwise very hierarchical one) to improve the maintenance activities of the U.S. Navy's aircraft carrier fleet. (Quiz: Without help, can you name all the carriers in the current fleet?)

So while I'm not really all that worried about our relationship with the Navy, it would be great to fill the room to hear what these folks are doing to create a peer-to-peer "organization" that is really made up of over 50 distinct organizations.

In the modern world, we are inundated with a flood of data and information. Traditional editing systems designed to help us sort through this clutter--like newspapers--are endangered and may not survive. But the increased flow of information makes it more important than ever that we learn how to convert the myriad data streams that surround us into useful knowledge and insights we can act on. I would even go so far as to say that we are seeking wisdom out of all those facts and numbers.

How can we accomplish this? The wise use of data depends on our ability to link it to real life, to real people and their experiences, to human transactions and interactions. History is littered with examples of companies that went awry because they did not understand the context and realities associated with the data they were supposedly analyzing. In other cases, leaders did not "ask deeply" enough. They knew what, how much, and where their customers were buying, but they didn't ask the right questions to ascertain why their customers bought what they did or what those people were really looking for. Often, what we sell is not what the customer is buying (something Peter Drucker points out in Innovation and Entrepreneurship).

Over the past decade, organizations have been hard at work developing new and better ways to create and share knowledge. Technology has made it easier to collaborate and facilitated widespread access to information and expertise. Unfortunately, the ever-increasing amounts of knowledge at our fingertips do not seem to have improved our judgment. From top Wall Street firms to national governments, we can all name organizations that, despite their rich hoards of knowledge, have exhibited terrible judgment that has caused them to falter and resulted in catastrophic damage. 

If we accept that knowledge and judgment are not the same thing, then we must ask ourselves: What goes into good judgment? How are knowledge and judgment linked, and where do they diverge? And finally, why have so many enterprises failed to form sound judgments, despite their extensive knowledge?

This one-hour call will take place next Thursday, March 25, at 10:30 a.m. Central time. You can register for the call at https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/204945736.

To read more about Stan, visit his Web site at http://sites.google.com/site/stangarfield.

Continuing the theme of my last post on digital devices, I really enjoyed the PBS.org documentary Digital Nation, which talks about the growing dominance of digital media and interaction on all our lives.   My husband and I had to pause the TiVo every five minutes to process what we were seeing. Both the entire documentary and short segments are available at this link.

My last two sentences are an ironic commentary on the message of the documentary itself: Are all our digital devices making us dumb, prompting us to think in sound bites instead of essays and willing to settle for just good enough instead of great when it comes to knowledge and information?

Or is the current transformation just a case of a new generation finding its own way? After all, every generation in recent memory has been more productive than the last.

However, that tide could be reversing.  Even though each generation of Americans in the past century has lived longer and been healthier than its parents, the next one promises to be sicker, given the unhealthy quantity and quality of food we eat and the emergence of gaming over playing. And paradoxically, this decline is all a result of our affluence and access to "the good life".

I'd love to hear your thoughts. Are we doomed to dumbing down, or just taking some time to get used to this new world?