Tech Perspective: Enhanced collaboration

We are just begining to look at knowledge management and collaboration. The concepts and logic behind KM and collaboration are on the surface fairly straight forward, and the technology is increasing in capability every day. Our most significant hurddle is a change management issue. We can buy and implement the software; it's changing the business processes and practices to encourage and institutionalise KM at all levels that is the most difficult.

Even though vendors have the hardware and software "answers" the organization itself needs to commit to KM, and unfortunately there is no "out of the box" solution for that problem.

Formal KM and collaboration initiatives will be generated one project at a time, until we can elevatethe practices to an enterprise wide activity.

As a consultant, i see this question as putting the cart before the horse, in a way. it was an excellent article on what to do with explicit knowledge--information that has been collected, analyzed and preserved for future similar use, but it does not address the harder issue--what to do about knowledge sharing in the tacit knowledge area. This is especially the case where the problem being addressed does not fit neatly into 'previous knowledge' but requires a broader attempt to secure good information and experience that might collectively apply.

This means that the normal knowledgebases--by themselves, are incomplete unless there are links to knowledgeable sources of similar information. All to ooften, that kind of information is not collected.

We like the Lotus product line for that very reason. using DOmino as the infrastructure, applying the Knowledge Discovery System with sources and potential sources of disparate information that they are willing to share is the way to go. We use knowledge audits to develop knowledge maps--particularly informal groupings of staff who routinely informally collaborate, and document the types of informal collaboration so that future efforts can use these threads to create new knowledge maps.

In our view, collaboration in this are has to be much more than simply passing explicit information in the hope that it will serve the purpose.

The best form of collaboration is still face to face communication. Electronic means are helpful in establishing contacts, confirming suppositions, and working on thoroughly understood systems.

In the long run, the cost of a plane ticket and a hotel room is amply paid off in the understanding which results.

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