The CX Blog

A post by Helen Day over at Intranet Benchmarking is interesting–she recently went to a KM, CM, IM conference in London and was a little bemused that more people attended the KM seminars than the CM.  Her reasons?

I’d come round to thinking that KM was a bit old hat.  I’d thought it was a term which had been labelled as one of those management consultants’ theories and was almost gone.  I’d worked in blue chip companies where KM was definitely a no-no term to use, where eyes drifted up to the ceiling at its mere mention.  I’d personally moved on into intranet management using good, solid information management skills; organising content for the user, managing content though proper life cycles etc.

What’s changed is the impact of Knowledge Sharing on traditional Knowledge Management.  Knowledge Sharing hasn’t just shaken things up, it’s made things–and getting information–a lot more interesting.  Knowledge Sharing, and all kinds of sharing, has opened up many vital channels all built on the holy trinity of  Web 2.0: tagging, RSS and linking.  This combination takes knowledge out of the tower and into the street.

Along these lines, I ran across Mooers’ Second Law last night in the context of Knowledge Management in the tired, traditional way: people will not rush to find information that will make their life/jobs harder.

They will rush, however, towards tools that make their jobs easier.

It made me think about most KM systems I’ve come in contact with, employed by blue chip companies to force support workers to use specific processes to answer questions  from customers and clients.  They don’t work because of Mooers’ Second Law.  New tools do work because they make life and work easier.  And as long as Google is out there, it will remain the benchmark for “easy to use.” Entire generations are soon to enter the workforce who do not know a Google-free world.

All other approaches to Knowledge Sharing will have to stand in the shadow of that simple search field in a field of white. You know: the one with the brightly colored letters and the funny name.