After thoughts from KM Asia

Sorry folks, I am been really busy with a lot of things such that I am overdue with a lot of blogposts in my mind.

The KM Asia 2007 Conference was really useful for me. Being a practitioner coming from the IT background, my focus is much more on how to enhance the tools and tweaking the work processes. By listening and interacting with the experts in the area, it has allowed me to understand the concepts in KM and issues encountered by others.

With this new knowledge, I think I am more equipped to refine the tools and processes on using it.

However there was one trend observed by many practitioners is that there is a tendency to glorify the KM initiative by coming up with KM slogans, publishing posters, newsletters and organizing a lot of events to promote the sharing culture.

While these may be

• raise the awareness for sharing knowledge
• an act to promote the KM initiative to the top management
• an act to lure more people to join in the KM team
• create more opportunity for people to exchange knowledge and might spark off innovation

It might be have opposite effects of increased resistance because

• people think the KM is the responsibility of the KM team
• people are frustrated due to being spammed with advertisements (I experienced that before)
• people dislike talking in public

Dave Snowden also gave a quote that

information + context = knowledge

I will like to extend on this formula that

knowledge + experience = efficiency

While it is possible to build up a knowledge base, it is impossible to replace someone with experience to digest the knowledge to work efficiently. Knowledge has to be incrementally built up over time and it is the experience that helps us to retrieve the relevant knowledge fast enough and make the appropriate decisions. Therefore the worry of sharing the knowledge will eventually make oneself replaceable may be an unfounded worry.