We all have them in our organizations.\u00a0 These wonderful islands of preserved knowledge: databases of content that have been donated over time for consumption by the broader corporate population.\u00a0 Once the dreams and hopes of management types that have dwindled down to exasperation as content has stagnated and catalogs confused.\u00a0 Content managers were usually \u201cchampions\u201d with other full time jobs, and content contributors were usually ourselves, with little or no real reason to contribute.<\/p>\n
The problem with those old knowledge management sites was that the content that provides value to everyone in the organization is more dynamic than most content managers and knowledge databases can actually reflect.\u00a0 Not only that, but true knowledge, the insights that people have over time, can\u2019t adequately be captured in a series of powerpoints.\u00a0 Usually knowledge is captured in conversations that result in knowledge, but the reflection of these in a KM practice are eventually inadequate documentation.\u00a0 Realize that I\u2019m talking about 95% of KM practices out there, but there probably are 5% that actually get it right.\u00a0 Maybe less.<\/p>\n
Most knowledge management tools are moving away from traditional database engines into wikis.\u00a0 Wikis will allow the KM practice to spend less time gathering content and cataloging it, and more time applying change management to the organization \u2013 basically where we all want to be \u2013 doing less administrative task and more of what really matters.<\/p>\n
The wiki does a couple of things \u2013 it takes knowledge directly from the the source, and allows multiple sources to have a dialog about it \u2013 constantly editing the content until it\u2019s just right.\u00a0 Then comes the post-editing process:\u00a0 as the understanding of the problem changes, the content is re-edited to fit the changing current scenarios.\u00a0 Another hugely beneficial problem is also removed.\u00a0 Because users will now be able to tag content entries, the problem of cataloging basically disappears.\u00a0 Users can search using normal \u201cgoogle-esque\u201d search, or by requesting relevant tags.\u00a0 As more users from different parts of the enterprise apply their tags based on their understanding and context of the content, more users will be able to return relevant search results.<\/p>\n
This all just means that at the end of the day, ensuring content is accurate and up to date is going to be self-managed by the organization, as will cataloging properly.\u00a0 Now, KM practitioners can spend more time on adoption and change management \u2013 an area which has always been a problem.\u00a0 But now, rather than simply requesting content from its sources, they are asking knowledge owners to participate in a knowledge generating exercise.\u00a0 Participation means 2 things \u2013 first, that the KM wiki is always up to date.\u00a0 Second, that as knowledge owners participate, they are also clarifying and updating their own insights through ongoing discourse with others.\u00a0 In other words, the KM wiki becomes simply part of the larger collaboration network that I\u2019ve written about often at systematicHR.<\/p>\n
Web 2.0 is bringing us many opportunities to optimize how we work and ensure we\u2019re getting the most out of our workforce talent, and while we don\u2019t usually think about KM as part of HR, it\u2019s most certainly going to figure into the talent equation in the future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We all have them in our organizations.\u00a0 These wonderful islands of preserved knowledge: databases of content that have been donated over time for consumption by the broader corporate population.\u00a0 Once the dreams and hopes of management types that have dwindled…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_coblocks_attr":"","_coblocks_dimensions":"","_coblocks_responsive_height":"","_coblocks_accordion_ie_support":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2,13,46],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-927","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hr-technology","category-knowledge-management","category-web-20"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/927","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=927"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/927\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=927"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=927"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=927"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}