Kathy Harris

You won’t be surprised to know that at Gartner, we track search terms to understand what our clients are thinking about. One thing they’re thinking about (and have for many years) is knowledge management. During the past 14 months, the term knowledge management ranked 40th among our search terms (with thousands of terms, that’s a high ranking). I’ll add that the partner terms ‘collaboration’ and ‘content management’ are always nearby ranked just above or below KM. 

I wrote here a few days ago that innovations emerge from reuse, recombination or creation. This means that KM and innovation are tightly connected – the linkage is that when we see and hear other people’s ideas, we find concepts and nuggets that we can apply in a different domain or we can combine these with other ideas to create something entirely new, and so on. So, good KM can drive innovation.

The technology that has supported KM in the past decade is focused on capturing knowledge into a “usable” form, which usually meant extracting information, converting it into structured formats or records and storing it as searchable content – in fact, content management really is the core of any KM efforts for most organizations. Beyond this effort to capture knowledge, collaboration software has enhanced KM by allowing people to connect and directly share their knowledge. Bottom Line: These are great efforts but the gap between content management and collaboration is significant and has left most of the highest value knowledge inaccessible (sitting in our heads) and thus, KM has been ineffective in most organizations.

But there is promise that we can close the gap and much more. Enter social software. These technologies allow us to inform others, to vent ideas or to express opinions in our own ‘voice’. And we can do so with text, whiteboards, videos, charts, audios and style, thus creating context-heavy content. Such content is highly communicative. It improves the actual uptake of knowledge. It stimulates thinking and reactions and responses to the content by others who consume it. It drives behavioral changes as people respond to, align with or distance themselves and their ideas from other individuals and groups.

And, all this can be captured (giving content management a second life) and consumed without losing the context. Better yet, value can be extracted from the content exchanged, the communities or networks formed and the behaviors exhibited or developed.