Knowledge Management - Quick wins
(another article I found sitting forlornly in my draft bucket since March for no apparent reason - late but not out of date)
Dave Pollard has posted another excellent post on KM. The scary thing is how many of the things he says not to do, I have seen done at various (or many) employers. Including:
- Directories of everyone and everything, rather than key people (not sure I agree with him here -it’s always good to look up colleagues in other offices on screen, especially when phoning having never met them)
- Self-appointed experts - this I have seen and it renders the entire system useless. He advocates other’s voting for who is expert on things. A kind of Digg for expertise.
- Using email for all electronic communication. Another favourite of mine. A particular gem is the email sent to tell everyone something has been published on the intranet. Gah! My rule of thumb - only send emails when there is an action. Use other tools such as Intranets or RSS for FYI’s. Give everyone an RSS reader and show them how to use it. Publish all the intranet information with RSS feeds. Then they can manage their own inbox, deciding when and where to process the FYI’s.
The tools exist to make this stuff easy. The theory is proven. Implementation - not so good. It’s worth remembering that the ubiquitous email hasn’t been with us all that long. How did it manage to get such a pervasive hold on everyone?
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