IT professionals, knowledge management and trout farming

Dave Snowden, in a comment to my previous rather flippant remark about IT professionals, makes a more important point about KM people falling into the same trap of "building over designed systems based on ideal behaviour rather than allowing naturalistic evolution".

It is in this context that a conversation going on in the Act KM discussions list at the moment about managing communities of practice is raising my usual concerns about the fatal combination of the words "knowledge", "communities" and "manage".

IMHO applying normal management techniques to something as fragile and ephemeral as online forums is doomed from the start. I always remember, and quote, Dave's phrase that "you can't manage knowledge - all you can do is create a knowledge ecology."

It just occurred to me that if there is such a thing as knowledge management, and with apologies to those who rightly recoil at the idea of "capturing knowledge", it is more akin to fly fishing than to trout farming.

Sadly there are few people who have the patience, or the respect for their quarry, required to be good fly fishermen.

Comments

[jd]

I think we could take your HO further - applying normal management techniques to just about anything involving the web is likely doomed. When trying to coach IT folk to overcome their fear of not being able to control social software, I try using a quote from David Weinberger's book 'Small Pieces Loosely Joined': "Consider how we would have gone about building the web had we deliberately set out to do so... we would have planned it, budgeted it, managed it... and we would have failed miserably." Sweet :-)