Chat IS Knowledge Management (or, So what is this “persistence” stuff anyway? – pt. 3)
In my first post of this series I discussed the basic notion of persistence in the context of chat and instant messaging. The key attributes of persistent group messaging include:
- long-lived group memberships,
- retained conversation history, and
- continuous participation.
These three attributes define persistent group chat (part 1). As a knock-on effect, persistent chat can establish a sense of “place” and continuity. Over time, this can further evolve into a sense of community (part 2).
Next, in this installment I would like to address the notion of knowledge management. Our friend Wikipedia starts its definition with “Knowledge management comprises a range of practices used by organisations to identify, create, represent, and distribute knowledge for reuse, awareness, and learning across the organisations…”
Knowledge management is either much-lauded or much-derided, depending on the messenger. I have been involved in several KM-like projects over the years and these have lead me to a middle-of-the road view. It is powerful, but often critically flawed. At the end of the day, everyone wants to be a consumer and no one wants to be a producer. Most KM solutions that I have seen (or helped develop) involve structured and often formal data gathering steps. This equates to more work for the users, which will rapidly trail off once the new-software smell wears off. This essential knowledge-capture step is what most endangers many KM efforts.
This is where persistent messaging comes in. In part 2 I alluded to this with my remark that “persistence allows for the automatic, transparent, and free capture of knowledge and enterprise memory.” What does this actually mean? It’s very simple. Once you have large numbers of your user base collaborating via a simple and easy technology like chat, you can capture their tacit knowledge automatically. By virtue of being persistent you already have message history. By leveraging the notion of groups, you already conform to what psychologists call knowledge schemas (information is going into the appropriate mental buckets). So… simply retain those logs and revend them to your user base. Make the information searchable and linked in to your security controls.
Imagine if you could pull work conversations out of thin air from your employees during meetings and teleconferences, perfectly transcribe them and put them in a searchable database. Effortlessly, and with minimal marginal effort. That’s what I mean by “free” capture. If you have chat deployed broadly with a well-heeled collaborative culture, people will be using it already to communicate and collaborate. Extending it as an implicit knowledge capture tool is a logical next-step.
The weakness of using chat for knowledge capture is that it is unstructured and imperfect. Some information may be lost, and it doesn’t have additional features such as peer-review, vetting or inter-system linking. But – what good is knowledge management if there’s no knowledge to manage? The point is that you’ll get more of this tacit, creativity-rich content this way.
I have an ongoing good-natured argument with one of my colleagues at work. He feels that chat is the enemy of knowledge management because it is unstructured and too conversational. I argue that chat is the only technology to begin delivery on the promises of knowledge management – because it captures the knowledge at the source, effortlessly.
cheers,
Eric
Eric
Good stuff again. I think the problem is that we think about knowledge “management” as a technology problem, to try and figure out how to optimize and re-use the knowledge we have. That’s interesting, but not the real benefit in my opinion.
Persistent Group Chat has some of those capabilites, but to me its so much more about knowledge “creation.” After all, the value we derive, real time or not, seems to be around those “tacit” interactions. Those tacit interactions by definition are sustainable competitively (there are no two groups alike, nor is the knowledge that group “creates”).
On the other hand, there may be incremental improvements in the way we capture and maintain (manage) knowledge, but that will be leveraged by everyone and offer no real competitive advantage in and of itself.
The key is whether or not your static or ad-hoc groups can make better and more accurate decisions in today’s “immediate” world. Can we help groups better deal with the ambiguity in front of us now, not just revisit those decisions in the future? If the answer is yes, then you are doing a better job of leveraging your unique knowledge and your competition will not have the same advanatge.
So maybe knowledge “management” is solvable only by better tacit or individual interactions. Knowledge becomes “stored” where it is best “accessed”….our own minds.
Hi Nick,
Thanks for the feedback. With economic and globalization trends such as they are, innovation and design are deemed by many to be the last bastions of value. I’ve read org behavior research essentially showing that high inter-unit communications is associated with innovative organizations. More specifically to your point, -organic structures- are very well suited for innovation. This argues in favor of allowing things like ad-hoc collaboration (read here: group channels).
Here’s something else to think about. In his book “Emergence”, Steven Johnson wonders how today’s children and adolescents, trained on self-adaptive game systems such as The Sims, will be in work settings. Games like that implicitly teach Nth order effects. That kind of behavior in large systems is highly organic. Extending Johnson’s question, then, will (near) future workforces demand that kind of organic collaboration and system creation/tear-down?
Cheers,
Eric