Work 2.0

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)

Even the traditional FSL has changed with knowledge management technology. My company recently undertook a organization-wide project management initiative. Through self-paced learning (asynchronous, web based training), employees that want to manage (or continue to manage) projects must undertake a series of project management modules, and pass tests at the end of each module (10). This is certainly FSL, but there is also a strong PDL portion. Employees were able to start this process in February and have until May 31 to complete it (I finished late last week…yea me). The Personal Directed Learning component was present, as it was up to each employee to manage their time. As more employees had trouble with the training and needed help, management responded by allowing employees to work in teams. Now this traditional model of “training” (FDL), used technology to create interactive, asynchronous training, but also employed PDL and GDL, as well. I am sure along the way there was ASL, and I would argue that that management response to the training could be a case for IOL.

Interestingly enough, it is the very training I finished in the corporate project management that was a direct response to knowledge management in the organization. There are too many pieces of information floating around the company to manage in a traditional way. Technology has made it a necessity to change the way we look at information and manage it. It could be through a system like Google Docs or Docushare (or systems in-between), but organizations that refuse to modernize not only their technology, but the way they view knowledge management will be relegated soon to mediocrity, if not obscurity.