Denham Grey is excited about Steve Barth's upcoming Deconstructing Knowledge Management with Steve Barth at KnowledgeBoard (May 24th).
Steve levels these charges:
- Right information, to right people at the right time - is the wrong focus
- The quest to 'know what we know' or codification has failed to yield efficiency
- Structure and processes imposed by KM have limited (natural) inquiry, creativity and awareness
- KM tools have reduced cognitive effectivity
His critique is spot on. Process is a knowledge killer, information is about messages, knowledge is sense-making, awareness and learning, organization of information is NOT KM and capturing stuff in 'knowledgebases' has a proven poor ROI. Where do we go next?
For those who know Denham, his list of "where do we go" should sound very familiar: deep dialog, patterns, distinctions, relationships, trust, and creative abrasion.
The KnowledgeBoard announcement includes a link to a chapter Barth wrote on PKM, Self-Organization: Taking a Personal Approach to KM. In it, he highlights the importance of dealing with one's own information and knowledge space. Some, including Denham, argue that PKM isn't that interesting, that it's simply hyped-up information management. Barth argues that information management is a key skill all on its own, but that PKM has to go beyond this to a set of principles around the information and ideas one deals with on a regular basis. These principles come from the information literacy work of Paul Dorsey and others at Millikin University: Accessing, Evaluating, Organizing, Analyzing, Conveying, Collaborating and Securing. (Unfortunately, the main Millikin PKM page seems to be missing. There seems to be an older set in their content management system. It looks like Dorsey is no longer at Millikin.)