Luis Suarez is a knowledge management consultant within IBM Global Business Services. Now in his tenth year with IBM, he’s clearly quite knowledgeable about KM. The first sentence of a very complimentary post on his E.L.S.U.A. blog about Informal Learning states:
…although not very much related to KM it has always been associated with it to some extent. Yes, indeed, I am talking about the subject of Learning.
I wonder if it’s beneficial to think of KM as something apart from learning. In Informal Learning, I wrote:
When the job environment changed but slowly, corporate learning involved acquiring the skills and know-how to do the job. Now corporate learning means keeping up with the new things you need to know to do the job. Maybe daily. The traditional barriers separating training, development, knowledge management, performance support, informal learning, mentoring, and knowing the latest news have become obstacles to performance. They are all one thing, for one purpose, and that’s performance.
What do you think? Do the old distinctions serve a purpose in today’s world?
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Hi Jay! Thanks a bunch for the feedback to my blog post and for adding some more into the conversation. I must say that while reading through your comments I just couldn’t help but agreeing with you on most of what you said, except that I feel that what you describe above is the way both KM and Learning seem to work nowadays, as opposed to some time ago, where both systems were actually substantially different to one another and to what we have nowadays. I have attempted to explain that further in this other follow up weblog post. Have a look and see what you think. Thanks!
Jay. I think this has always been a source of some debate – at least in the learning technology community. My own view is that the distinction between KM and learning have always been artificially exagerated, often reflecting the personal and organisational vested interests rather than a hard divide. In the corporate world, KM was rather high-jacked by the IT agenda which had a strong incentive for it not to be associated with anything as mundane as “training”. This position looks somewhat irrelvant nowadays.
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