In early
2001 I was introduced to a tool that went on to change the way I thought about
knowledge management: Docushare. At that time, I was a young project director
of a mid-sized Federal grant, and I had a lot of irons in the fire: I was in
the field over 60% of the time, had partner agencies in Micronesia, Hawaii, and
the U.S. Mainland, and a lot of reporting to track. This was 2001. Faxes and
sending documents FedEx ruled the knowledge management world and emails and
PDFs were okay to say, “your signed copy is coming”. All this paper (and there
was a lot of it) went into filing cabinets and all the electronic versions of
things went on to corporate shared hard drives. If I needed to find a document,
I had to hope that the filing system (both physical and electronic) was done in
a logical, effective manner. Of course, being in the field over half the time
didn’t mean I was immune from reporting. Admin staff had to know where to
recover information for reports, and if I was lucky enough to be on the
Internet, it was usually dial-up speeds made even slower by going through the
corporate VPN. In short, I was hamstrung by the technology. Then, in a meeting
with the project’s external evaluators, they pulled up a web page to access the
latest report that had been completed in New York a few hours earlier (we were
in Hawaii) for us to go over. At that point, I could care less about the report
and wanted a demo of this document storage device that was on the web!
Docushare. I was in awe. This was years before Google Docs or the other many
services available now. Here was a system that would allow multiple users to
upload documents to a “shared drive.” Very cool. Much easier and faster than
having to go to the corporate hard drive and connect through a very slow
VPN…very much like Dropbox, but 7 years earlier. But wait! There’s more! All the documents were
searchable IN THE TEXT…and…wait for it…it tracked multiple revisions. I could
now work on reports collaboratively with the team, no matter where any of us
happened to be in the world. Security could be layered across folders for
different access levels, and it was all secure. If I needed a document from
Hawaii that was just mailed in, an admin could scan it through a copier and
select a destination folder inside Docushare. It changed the way we did
business. More than that, it changed the way we viewed information and
information management. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was participating
in the flatting of knowledge management.
It is now
2012. Document management systems are the norm, whether it is a school system
that has adopted Google Docs, or corporations using
improved-upon Docushare (or like) systems. It is
taking the old corporate shared hard drives, or even the new cloud-based
storage like Dropbox and Google Drive. Knowledge management has changed the way
business is done, and some folks are still trying to figure out what happened. How
did goods that used to be expensive luxury items (or at least, mid-ranged
items) end up in discount stores like Walmart? The call centers down the road
that are boarded up…why did that happen? Schools more concerned about making
sure every child feels good about themselves, while math and science scores continue
to slip farther behind other countries. On a global sense, the world has been
continuing to embrace (and understand) the new era of knowledge management,
while the United States is slowly starting to awake to it. The irony of it all,
is it has all happened (at least, largely in part) to respond to American
business.
Breaking it down further, are two articles, The Three Eras of Knowledge Management, a blog article by Nancy Dixon; and A framework for social learning inthe enterprise, a blog article by Harold Jarche. Dixon’s article gives a good summary of knowledge management evolution, and actually corresponds to my own example at the beginning of this article. Going in a timeline from 1995 to 2005, it shows the progression of the “old school” management control of content in 1995, to the transparency of information and content in 2005. A very short 10 year span to change the way businesses manage information. This is not to say ALL businesses have embraced this. Some companies still lag behind with not only technology of knowledge management, but also the paradigm shift to embrace HOW that technology works. It is one thing to put into place the infrastructure to allow for knowledge management in an organization; it is quite another for management to put INTO PLACE knowledge management. I like how Dixon summaries knowledge management as a response to two areas: 1, where knowledge lives within organizations, and 2, what knowledge is important to organizational success. Through an effective knowledge management system, company information can be accessible to people that need information, and often that is far beyond management. Flat. The second article by Jarche really gets into the idea of “social learning” in the workplace. What really jumped out at me was his analyzing of social learning. That there are two types of learning in the workplace: formal (training) and informal learning (observation, conversations, time on task). The “jumped-out-at-me-part” was that informational learning was 80% of on the job learning! He also classified different learnings that should be part of organizational structures, and not necessarily the formal trainings of the past. Of the following learnings, only one (FDL) is actually traditional.
IOL: Intra-Organizational Learning (keeping the organization up to date on strategic and internal activities)
GDL: Group Directed Learning (teams of people working together)
PDL: Personal Directed Learning (individuals taking responsibility for their own learning)
ASL: Accidental & Serendipitous Learning (learning without realizing it)
FSL: Formal Structured Learning (classes, training, workshops, both ansynchronous and synchronous)
