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KM becoming RM?

I thought I would post a quick comment on a trend that I've been seeing in Australian public-sector organisations: knowledge management becoming records management.

That is, the "knowledge management initiative" is handed across to the library/records management folk, who then implement projects such as:

• records management systems
• document management systems
• corporate taxonomies/thesaurii

While these are all important things to do, they are obviously only a very small corner of knowledge management. Yet, in many organisations I've seen, this is all that's left of the initial enthusiasm about KM.

In these situations, there is no focus on the people-related aspects (such as communities of practice, or knowledge sharing in general), nor on the cultural or process issues within the organisation.

I find this a worrying trend, as it suggests a general decline of KM across the industry as a whole, with what's left just being subsumed by existing disciplines such as records/document management.

My question: is this just an oddity of the Australian public-sector, or have others noted this same trend elsewhere?

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Posted by jamesr on July 09, 2004 11:10 AM
Categories: Knowledge management

Comments

James, totally agree with your thoughts. I maintain organisations including the public service have tended to put the cart before the horse. I haven't seen any initiatives that capture culture managment/change management to broaden our thinking and practices (i.e. people focussed rather than systems) in the way we want to manage our knowledge and information.
I wouldn't consider a KM project unless we had a significant focus and commitment upon the people/culture issues along with plenty of visible actions that say why we would want to offer KM as a way of working. How often have we seen 'solutions' to particular organisational problems to be based out of systems thinking?
And not all people in an organisation are system thinkers (that is to generalise that IT folk generally have systems thinking). I admire the way in which IT respond to current technology and business solutions but putting systems etc into place before the people issues are up to speed can be a waste of time - particularly where the 'idea' isn't taken up by the user.
KM has to make sense for the organisation - this isn't putting one side of the equation forward to manage data - nor is it about 'user training'. The success for an uptake of KM is much deeper than that and it'll happen if people know why it's a way of working in the organisation and communities.

Posted by: Jane Kirk on July 12, 2004 10:51 AM

I agree as well. However, the unfortunate reality is that records management is a must-have-by-law function (e.g.., for financial compliance, US SOX and Canada 198), and will likely become even more so. KM in the sense that we like to talk about it (communities, knowledge sharing, info leverage) is more an ideal and about good hygiene than something the absence of which could lead to participation in a less pleasant community behind bars.

"Pure KM" advocates should jump on the RM bandwagon (cynically or otherwise) and take advantage of that investment to implement their plans.

/don

Posted by: Don DePalma on July 21, 2004 11:42 PM

This is very much the approach I am taking with my clients. KM and IM (info management) are quite different: one deals with people and the other with info artefacts. Unfortunately, the ICT industry has tried to tell us that KM is about technology, which is it not. So, many KM initiatives end up what they really were initially: improving IM. Further, given that most organisations are not prepared to address long-standing cultural issues, any 'real' KM initiatives are not likely to succeed anyway. Hence, again, they revert to IM. And finally, in my experience, KM of any type benefits from a capable IM regime to allow the knowledge to be captured and shared. So, again, we come back to the need for effective IM before we can really have effective KM.

Posted by: Bryan Kalms on July 25, 2004 11:08 AM