Institutional Memory

Denham Grey, a leading KM practitioner who also fostered the KM Wiki provides the context for the dream of knowledge management, what went wrong and what was discovered.

The dream:

One of the central themes of KM is the design, building and maintenance of an effective 'corporate memory', a repository, a dare I say it, knowledge-base. Here the intellectual jewels of the organization will reside, easily accessible, expertly indexed, intuitively browseable. Here experts and novices will come for self-help knowledge, they will find the correct solution quickly, be able to apply the solutions with confidence, and learn from the 'collective experience of the organization'.

Many dollars have been invested, many organizations have egg on their collective faces, many repositories lie unused, shunned by novices and experts alike and yet there are more KM projects starting each day with the same vision / mission and yet another dream. Perhaps we think portals or automatic profiling or collaborative systems or social software will do it this time!

What matters is social context. Go read the whole thing, and his discoveries. Related: Spike Hall differentiates social context at the individual, group and organizational level.

Denham also shares his practices and tools (including Socialtext!).

Denham points out his focus on knowledge creation (awareness, learning, community); instead of intellectual capital (knowledge assets, branding, knowledge exchanges). His emphasis is on social capital: The real challenges lie in getting groups to leverage their learning, to combine and synthesise their insights, experience and expertise.

Perhaps what's new this time is we learned by suppporting user desires to get things done more efficiently, connect organically, and keep it simple so everyone can participate -- the result builds institutional memory When people are the intelligent agents their actions in aggregate have emergent properties. Like with weblogs on the public Internet, the best content and expertise rise to the top naturally. While social capital is a necessary precondition for the development of intellectual capital, such a lofty strategic value proposition is unnecessary. Help people produce first -- and learn as they go.