If not technology then what?

The ongoing Knowledge Management discussion of technology versus non-technology continues with Don Cohen's post at Babson Knowledge. He starts out with the question:

Again and again during the two dozen interviews I’ve conducted
to figure out what we’ve learned from a decade of knowledge management
experiences, practitioners said, “Knowledge management projects focused mainly
on technology will fail,” or words to that effect. No surprise there. From the
early days of KM, thoughtful commentators talked about the human and
organizational elements of knowledge work and the need to balance technology,
process, and culture. Everyone heard stories of failed technology-driven
projects—“knowledge bases” ignored by intended users, unreliable and abandoned
expertise locators.
But some of the same practitioners who expressed this
supposedly obvious truth said that the point had to be made again and again to
prevent their organizations from falling back into the mistake of depending on
technology to make knowledge sharing happen. Companies still invest in mainly
technological fixes to knowledge problems and, when those fail, they do it
again, pinning their hopes on some improvement or other in the
software.
Why?

The way I read his answer is that most professional KM practitioners and/or their clients find the soft side of KM (culture, process, environment) to be too difficult and that it's simpler to just rely on a good old technology solution and hope for the best. He also uses the analogy of the factory or machine model to express the thinking of many organizational leaders.

I think many leaders still want to think of their organizations as efficient
machines and people as part of the equipment who “should” adjust themselves to
the rest of the mechanism without pampering or a lot of talk about
“culture.”

I would add to that by saying that there hasn't been a great framework for dealing with the issue until now either. KM seemed to be all about a single monlithic methodolgy to capture and republish an organization's knowlege.

Most of the KM solutions have been top down in nature. The executives decide that knowledge needs to be managed better and they bring in so and so to make it happen. Until now.

Informal learning strategies and user directed technologies have the potential to combine to make true knowledge management a reality by harnessing the power of individual motivation. Here I would replace the factory model with the agriculutural model. You can't make a plant grow but you can encourage the right conditions for growth. Given the right conditions and the availability of technology, people will create and publish knowledge. Organizations just have to harvest what is produced. The key is cultivating the right strategy given the cultural environment of the organization.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

technorati: knowledge management :: km