During
the Q&A panel at the Knowledge and Content UK 2008 conference in Victor Newman, formerly of Pfizer, had some interesting things to say. He distinguishes two kinds of KM. One is KM related to supporting the company's existing strategy. The other is KM related to supporting the strategy that the company will need to survive in tomorrow's world. His assumption is that most companies are dying in the sense that the strategies they are currently pursuing will not provide long-term survival, a premise supported by the fact that roughly half of the Fortune 1000 companies of 20 years ago no longer exist. And all the signs are that the death rate is accelerating.
So it's not so much a question of whether firms will have to change their strategies, but rather: When? And how much time have they got? In effect, every strategy has a sell-by date. The knowledge angle of this is that the knowledge you need to be successful today is not likely to be the knowledge you will need to be successful tomorrow. The easy, the convenient, the comfortable thing to do is to keep focusing on the knowledge that makes you successful today and delivering that knowledge more efficiently. At best, this buys you time, not survival.
The more important, more difficult, and more uncomfortable thing is to focus on what knowledge you will need to be successful tomorrow. To have that conversation, you need to figure out: How do you get the people into the room who really know about that stuff (and they will usually be the troublemakers of various kinds), and how do you get the people out of the room whose only interest in continuing to pursue today's (ultimately losing) strategy? The latter group of people will usually be in positions of considerable power in the hierarchy and are generally not particularly interested in having that conversation. As a result, it's not easy to have the conversation. Which is why the death rate of big, profitable, apparently healthy corporations is so high.
So it should not be a surprise that KM is dying. It is almost axiomatic in the
sense that all businesses are dying. The only question for KM is: Is it a
business that is taking steps to deal with that? Is it identifying the sell-by
date of its current strategy and identifying the knowledge about KM that it
will need to make that strategy successful in future? How will it get the
people into the room who have that sort of knowledge so as to enable a
meaningful conversation about those issues?
Kamlesh Pande sent the following comment by e-mail and has asked me to post it to the site:
This is very much in line with Zack’s Framework explaining a strong link between KM strategy and business strategy.
I strongly feel that if we keep Zack’s Framework in mind, we may actually decelerate the “death rate.”
To my way of thinking the entire world of KM has been eclipsed by two thrusts :1)www.wikipedia.com, other URL's searable from google or yahoo and university websites 2) Rapid rate of change in technology that enables data driven solutions rather that "great thinker" models and theories.
I hypothesize that the failure of roughly half of the Fortune 1000 companies of 20 years ago is a management and short term performance measure shareholder focus problem. Specifically, the dinosauric, Von-Newmann (single top up/down decision making, ISO type quality standards, Frederick Taylor) laggard organization structures and performance measures.
The quick and nimble can outpace the laggards in technology, organizational structures, and people management.
Dick Bailey
Steve - I absolutely don't believe KM is dead, in fact I think it's more alive than it's been in the previous 5 years at least.
We did a specific cut of our Enterprise 2.0 research to see if success with Enterprise 2.0 came from companies that profiled as being more KM-inclined than not (not by outright asking them their thoughts on KM, but their behaviors, rewards, etc.).
Definitive difference between the "enlightened" and the average bear.
Free download of the research is at http://www.aiim.org/enterprise20 - for those who are interested.
You can also see the keynote presentation we did at the Enterprise 2.0 conference discussing the generational myth as well - that can be found at http://www.enterprise2conf.com/archive/videos/playvideo/index.php?id=643 - at 15 minutes, it's fairly digestible, and no wardrobe malfunctions!
Cheers,
Dan