Knowledge management systems seek to organize corporate information assets in ways that can aid future process, yet in almost every case, KM systems fail to deliver. John Robb tips us to a post by Huron Consulting Group's Jim McGee that muses on why traditional KM fails and advocates a fundamental shift not in the way we actually do our business, but in the way we try to model it:

The fatal flaw in thinking in terms of knowledge management is in adopting the perspective of the organization as the relevant beneficiary. Discussions of knowledge management start from the premise that the organization is not realizing full value from the knowledge of its employees. While likely true, this fails to address the much more important question from a knowledge worker's perspective of "what's in it for me?". It attempts to squeeze the knowledge management problem into an industrial framework eliminating that which makes the deliverables of knowledge work most valuable--their uniqueness, their variability. This industrial, standardizing, perspective provokes suspicion and both overt and covert resistance. It also starts a cycle of controls, incentives, rewards, and punishments to elicit what once were natural behaviors.

Hands up all those who's see that happen! Jim continues his analysis by looking at the human factors of an organization, at how the common language of KM consulting has boxed their projects into these awkward containers, and how our goal really should be to make it easier for a knowledge worker to create and share unique results, and to share them with people. What Jim says about boxing our knowledge worker support systems into containers is true, too: In doing my usual scouting for web artifacts to annotate this article, I typed knowledge worker into the Google image search, and sure enough, I had to sift several pages to find an image of people communicating with people among dozens of slaves changed to some kind of machine.

One has to ask which of these two worlds is the one where we want to work, and which would be the one where we'd expect to collect the most benefit.

If you ask me, it's no accident that you and I both learned of Jim's unique results through the dynamic interactions in our networks of social software and not through some discovery via a document management system ...

[ Source: McGee\'s Musings ]

One image I did find was this objectivist image and while it's a proud and noble image of the boiler technician plying his trade, consider a scenario where that boiler begins to burst, steam fills the room, alarms sound, heavy things start to tremble and shake, and, well, for all his skill, our local expert decides he's in over his head.

Now riddle me this -- if you were outfitting his supporting information network, if you were him, which would you rather he do:

• boot up some index catalog, try to gather keywords enough to sift through hierarchical menus or long list of search results to find the particular set of documents covering this particular fault scenario on this particular set of equipment, load results into Adobe AcroReader and scan each one looking for what he needs to know, print it off and take it back to the rupturing pipes to follow the step by step instructions best he can .... or ...
• put a headset on him connecting to a system that can broadcast his colloquial description of the problem to a wide field of knowledgable peers, then connect him immediately, in real time, with any and all of those peers who accept the challenge of the situation.

I know I've been asked to code the first option, for the Oil and Gas emergency response industry no less, but if you ask me, if it was me in the dark boiler room about to erupt, give me the headset. As for my chances of getting one issued to me by KM engineers, I can't answer that, but what I do know is the Google results failed to find even one Knowledge Worker image depicting people communicating directly with people, mediated by computers.