If Only We Knew What We Know (Book 3 of 30)

Title: If Only We knew What We Know
Authors: Carla O'Dell and C. Jackson Grayson, Jr.

This book can probably be tagged as a classic, or at least one of the better known books on Knowledge Management and part of the early wave.  It was first published in 1998.  Carla O'Dell is still doing a great deal of work around Knowledge Management within a broader agenda at the APQC.  There is a consistent style and format to everything APQC does.  It's a bit like a Harvard Business School article.  You can expect something very readable, practical, accessible to people who are new to knowledge management, and an excellent source of benchmarking information.

Some books age better than others.  I'd say there's nothing wrong with this book even though it's almost 20 years old, but as with any older book, any mention of technology is going to be very outdated.  The principles behind the integration of technology might still be valid, but the specific technologies and technology challenges have changed.

What I like about this book

The idea that there is a wealth of internal knowledge that is underutilized in most organizations is still highly relevant and valid. Leveraging internal knowledge in the form of best practices, for example, is still very valuable.  However, I have developed over the years a certain skepticism about best practices.

First, the world is moving too fast for best practices to be valuable for very long.  There is a need for a very dynamic approach to knowledge management, a greater focus on knowledge flows. Developing best practices can turn into a labor intensive, time consuming effort that results in something soon outdated and overtaken by events.

Second (and a related point), it can be difficult to differentiate best practices from common sense basic knowledge and a lot of effort can be spent reinventing the wheel when that time and effort could have been better spent looking for emergent knowledge and focusing more on innovation and constant improvement.

Organizations fail to "know what they know" when they've built internal knowledge silos over time with very little sharing across organizational boundaries.  This is often the result of a mix of cultural barriers and inhibiting organizational structures.  Both need to be addressed to enhance organizational knowledge flows.

Other early KM books I may not have on my list of 30 for this month

• The Fifth Discipline, 1990
• Working Knowledge, 1998

Recommending to read?  

No, just read a published summary and follow up with The New Edge of Knowledge: How Knowledge Management is Changing, as an update to this early volume.

Knowledge Management in Federal Agencies

The Federal Knowledge Management Working Group launched a Federal Knowledge Management Initiative a while ago. Members of the group are feverishly working within Action Groups to create sections of a Roadmap document. I'm a little skeptical about the overall value and quality of what is going to emerge as the final document but if the primary objective of the initiative is to put knowledge management on the agenda of the Obama Administration and the leadership of federal agencies, then it might achieve that.

I have been participating in two of the Action Groups and in the process, I've learned a few things about "writing by committee", the challenges of writing a coherent piece when the authors come from different perspectives and don't share a common language, using a wiki to work on collaborative writing, how to get group members to volunteer for specific writing or review and editing tasks, and more generally, how to voice disagreement effectively.

The centerpiece of the initiative is the creation of a Federal KM Center. Sometimes, when you are trying to make a point (as in.. there is a need for a Federal KM Center to increase the visibility of KM in Federal Agencies), you end up emphasizing the negative (there are few Chief Knowledge Officers, Federal Agencies employ ad hoc KM practices, etc...) and failing to highlight the real successes. For example, a couple of agencies (esp. Army and NASA) are perceived as good examples to follow and repeatedly mentioned as such while many agencies that have developed relevant and successful "knowledge management" practices are much less visible and never mentioned.

What if the reality is that many more Federal Agencies are implementing Knowledge Management related activities, don't necessarily feel the need for a formal KM program, and achieve great results without one? There is an assumption that if you don't have a formal KM program you're probably not doing enough, not doing much. What if not needing a formal KM program is a sign that you are already ahead of the curve and your KM approach is well integrated in your operations?

What if an agency that is allowing its various offices to develop their own best practices or lessons learned activities is more effective than a centralized KM office? Which should come first? A centralized KM program? The ad hoc emergence of best practices/lessons learned activities within organizational units? If the objective is to generate quick wins, I would suggest that ad hoc activities at the local level, within organizational units is more effective. Once those local level mechanisms are in place, coordination and knowledge sharing across organizational units can help build greater organizational learning at the agency level.

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