Knowledge is a Means, Not an End

Elizabeth Albrycht of the Society For New Communications Research, writes a post describing their new research project into how wikis are being used. She states:

Our goal in our project is to study how knowledge workers in creative roles (advertising, marketing, public relations, design, etc.) are actually using wikis in the context of their everyday work. This should enable us to make some judgments about what features are helpful and what features are not. At that point, we can start making recommendations about best practices for wiki design.

A noble exercise and one that I (given what I write about here) am definitely interested in, but one that I have doubts about given some signals I am picking up in the piece. There seems to be a preconception of wikis being a 'repository' and Knowledge Management (KM) being an end in itself. (BTW this post started off as a comment to that post, but I got rerouted to another website when I posted the comment, so I'm not sure it actually posted).

I hope this doesn't come across as a criticism of Ms. Albrycht's study, but one of my frustrations with KM is the difficulty in defining the purpose of KM. 'Knowledge', in my opinion, is a byproduct of one process or a reference for some 'next process'. Knowledge is relevant only in the context of having been produced or referenced in meeting some objective. In the absence of context, 'Knowledge' loses purpose. Managing knowledge without context is like driving in fog (I like using pictures as metaphors).

Topics to be researched in the study include:

....several factors to consider when designing and implementing a wiki. None of these alone are sufficient to wiki success, but we believe each is indeed, important, perhaps even necessary. Our objective is to provide qualitative data that will support these assumptions, as well as uncover new criteria.

• Support of Reputation Development
• Clear Procedures of Management and Discipline
• Defined and Followed User Responsibilities
• Content: Knowledge Creation and Decision Making
• Group Attributes
• Effective Wiki Design
• Training/Convincing People

Where is the context of the knowledge produced or used? What is reason these groups are even using a wiki? These topics focus on knowledge for the sake of knowledge and the mechanics of governance and usage - traditional approaches that can be attributed to the overall failing of past KM efforts.

The piece does accurately identify the issue of getting people to contribute their knowledge and overcoming the obstacle of hoarding wisdom. This phenomenon, however, has more to do with the absence of context than it does group dynamics. People work to achieve objectives, goals, projects, and deliverables; not knowledge. Knowledge is simply the byproduct that gets lost with current technologies.

With the wiki, a tool for facilitating the process is now integrated with the means for capturing the knowledge. But you have to do both.

There seems to be a predisposition with KM practitioners for treating wiki content as an evolving document repository(knowledge) for general use by an audience - knowledge for the sake of knowledge. What gets missed with that perspective is that a wiki can actually 'facilitate the process' of some end objective where 'information' is continually being generated, captured, referenced, and enhanced resulting in 'knowledge'.

A wiki is all about peer review. For example, users have the responsibility for fixing mistakes they find, when they find them.

That's true with the Wikipedia model, the gold standard of centralized Internet knowledge management. But that's not what wikis facilitate for objective-based teams and groups working in the enterprise. Peer review is a good practice to promote, but getting a project executed quickly, completely, and with a high degree of quality is what the enterprise needs. Peer review ensures accurate knowledge - for the purpose of getting work done smarter!

The study won't be completed for a couple months, but I hope it identifies the value of wikis for facilitating group processes, activities, tasks, and goals that create and use information and not just wiki-based KM for its own sake. KM should be a means to some end. Wikis have a much larger potential as an activity-centric facilitator than yet another data-centric repository. Wikis will suffer the same fate as Lotus Notes and share drives if that's the case.

Comments

[Elizabeth Albrycht]

"Knowledge is relevant only in the context of having been produced or referenced in meeting some objective. In the absence of context, 'Knowledge' loses purpose."

This is indeed interesting, and I agree to a point. Some questions: If I cannot find information in order to use it, then does it never becomes knowledge? (Seems reasonable to say that.) Where does that information reside before it is so transformed? I don't think you can have knowledge without access to an information repository in this schema. That repository can be someone's head or a system (KM, wiki etc.)

Perhaps the wiki is a repository of information, which can be transformed, when used, into knowledge (and KM is a misnomer). One of the interesting things to me about wikis is that authors/participants produce both content (let's call it that for the moment) and the navigation of that content. So, when does the navigation of content become knowledge-in-context?

In fact, studies I read in KM and wiki demonstrate that they are more adept at capturing "knowledge" (their words) when people use the KM or wiki in the process of their work, vs. having them be some stand-alone repository. I think that is what you are saying is needed.

You conclude: "...I hope it identifies the value of wikis for facilitating group processes, activities, tasks, and goals that create and use information and not just wiki-based KM for its own sake."

It is our suspcision that wikis are being used in this fashion, but given we are observing actual use, we'll need to let the data drive our conclusions. We are focusing on internal corporate workgroups, so should have some interesting results to share about the differences between that and public (Wikipedia) use.

Thank you for sharing your thoughts. I have provided a link to this post at the Review in comments. I am not sure why you had difficulty commenting - perhaps it is because the recent domain name change. In any case, I just commented with the link here and it worked fine.

[kris olsen]

Elizabeth's response is very encouraging, especially these two points:

(1) In fact, studies I read in KM and wiki demonstrate that they are more adept at capturing "knowledge" (their words) when people use the KM or wiki in the process of their work, vs. having them be some stand-alone repository. I think that is what you are saying is needed.

and (2) It is our suspicion that wikis are being used in this fashion, but given we are observing actual use, we'll need to let the data drive our conclusions.

(1) that's exactly what I'm saying and (2) now I really am looking forward to the results.

Thanks, Elizabeth!