KM and Learning: Separated at Birth?
Seventy people attended this morning's eLearning Forum to discuss the convergence, or lack of same, of Knowledge Management and eLearning, fifty of us in a conference room in Redwood Shores and the remainder participating via Interwise.
I kicked things off with a few observations:
- The Glossary on my site defines knowledge management as "whatever you want it to be."
- The director of a knowledge management institute in Europe told me he expected KM and eLearning to converge in three years. I suggested we start right now.
- IBM's Larry Pruzak says the smokers standing outside an office are a great catalyst to grassroots KM: they come from all ranks and departments, and and are free to talk about whatever comes to mind.
- "Information is not instruction," says Dr. David Merrill. So KM is not eLearning. So what? If it gets the job done, why does what we call it matter?
- Why are KM and eLearning generally cast in adversarial rather than cooperative roles?
Several of us plan to write articles on what we heard today. Soon, notes and pictures will appear on eLearning Forum's website.
In the wrap-up, I contributed a new meme to the KM toolkit: Virtual Smokers. You don't have to ruin your lungs to talk with people in other departments and at other levels.
Posted by Jay Cross at August 15, 2003 11:31 PM | TrackBack
Information Week agrees with my take on KM.
Need To Know Aug. 18, 2003
Knowledge management has gone from pie-in-the-sky promises to more-realistic applications
By Tony Kontzer
This just in from the knowledge-management front: Whatever your company is doing in this area, and it probably should be doing something, don't call it knowledge management. Many people take a rather dim view of that term. OK, let's not mince words: Knowledge management might as well have promised to wash the dishes and mow the lawn for all the hard business benefits many companies believe they've gotten from it. Yet even as they ditch the baggage-laden nomenclature, companies are moving ahead with IT-enabled initiatives to better gather and share the expertise and data that lives within their organizations. Half of companies in InformationWeek Research's second-quarter Priorities survey list knowledge management as a top technology priority. What they're doing is toning down the pie-in-the-sky initiatives of yesteryear into simpler, more-focused business strategies, enabled by less-obtrusive technologies that leverage, above all, search and collaboration.
"A lot of knowledge-management disasters occurred because someone with a grand initiative tried to get their arms around the whole enterprise," says Art Murray, managing director of the George Washington University Institute for Knowledge Management. "Often such things collapse under their own weight."
Posted by: Jay at August 27, 2003 01:16 PMDave Pollard on SOCIAL NETWORKING, SOCIAL SOFTWARE AND THE FUTURE OF KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT.
Posted by: Jay at August 30, 2003 02:11 PM
