Future of Knowledge Management

Recently I was invited as a speaker in the Knowledge Management Society (KMS) . This is one of the most active societies and have been holding regular sessions on KM. I talked about the Future of KM.

This blog is a summary of my session. Lets jump into it.

As we talk about Future of KM, I would like to begin by referring to the view expressed by Stan Garfield in an interview conducted by Rajesh Dhillon as part of TL series of Acies Innovations

Stan was asked how he sees the future of KM to be. Stan’s response was interesting and I agree with what he said.

As per Stan, the basics do not change and they will not change. However the technology used to apply KM will change.

What he said is true. When we look at Future of KM, essentially the needs because of which KM as a function came into being will not change. How these needs are delivered would change, thanks to technology.

Then what would change? Lets take a look into. Mind you I am not a soothsayer and I am only trying to predict the possibilities based on the current scenario.

Before we jump into visualising the future, lets first understand what are those basics that don’t change:

1. Identifying and safeguarding critical knowledge
2. Capturing and documenting relevant work related information and knowledge and making it easily accessible
3. Facilitating tacit knowledge sharing and collaboration
4. Enabling generation of new knowledge and innovation through interventions
5. Promoting reuse of knowledge, knowledge artefacts through policy, process changes and evangelisation.?

One can add a few more including knowledge transfer, knowledge institutionalisation, to this.?

The above mentioned basics don’t change. They need to be performed irrespective of the nature and industry in which an organisation is.?

Then what is changing??

While the basics don’t change, how they get delivered will change. This change is governed by the way organisations work and work is being done.

Let’s check how things are changing and how it will impact KM.

A lot of things happened in the last couple of years. Pandemic came and changed/disrupted the way we live and work. Pandemic impacted the way organisations function and how work gets performed. This in turn is influencing how we deliver KM practices

Lets go into the changes that happened

• Move to hybrid and virtual working: While work from anywhere as a concept was always there, pandemic fast tracked this and slowly virtual and hybrid working is becoming a nom
• Hyper distribution of organisations across geographies: Thanks to virtual working, organisations have the opportunity to source talent from across the world.?
• Increased acceptance of freelance/gig workers: We are moving into a gig economy. Organisations are more comfortable hiring free lancers for specialised work, which need not be in-house. ?
• Moonlighting becoming common: With more opportunities opening up for gig workers and virtual working becoming common, moonlighting will become a norm or taking up multiple jobs.
• Power locus moving towards employees: Especially knowledge workers with unique and costly skills are becoming very powerful.
• Unprecedented automation and adoption of technology: AI driven process automation solutions are becoming very common. Intelligent applications are able to identify patterns, build processes around it and take up those work.?
• Knowledge work becoming common: The simple and complicated work is getting automated. Machines are becoming intelligent to automate the process. We may not need a software engineer to code and automate a process. What it means is we will see more and more automation and work that will be done by human being will be mostly complex work in nature

What does this mean for Knowledge Management:

In future some of the key challenges or requirements (the way you see it), that the knowledge managers need to cater to would involve the following:

1. Sharing and collaboration and flow of tacit knowledge: As teams become more distributed, adopt hybrid mode of working, the natural ways of sharing and collaborating gets impacted. You will find more employees from different nationalities, located across geographies coming in. They may not bond as employees who are in the same physical space. This will in turn impact sharing and collaboration. We may find more and more employees feeling isolated.
2. Sharing and collaboration with Gig workers: Highlighting this separately. Gig workers may not align with organisational culture as their engagement is part time. However expectations will be from them to share and support other employees.?
3. Safeguarding critical knowledge & operational knowledge: With distributed teams and higher percentage of gig workers, it would become difficult to capture critical knowledge. This would include lesser support and difficulty in tracking teams to capture knowledge.?
4. Capturing knowledge, best practices from gig workers: When gig workers move in and move out fast, how to ensure key knowledge is captured from them. This is going to be an issue and combined with moonlighting can threaten loss of critical knowledge
5. Institutionalisation of knowledge: Institutionalisation of knowledge needs a strong KM culture and practices that can be used to capture and embed knowledge. We may find more and silos of knowledge that doesn’t get shared across. These silos may be smaller in size and many in number
6. Higher dependency on documented knowledge: Knowledge workers will find it difficult to easily access right information and knowledge. They will in turn start depending on the knowledge repositories of the organisation to find right guidance, best practices, processes etc.
7. Challenges in creating new knowledge: Pace of knowledge creation may slow down, with lesser opportunities to have free flowing discussions, as well as structured reflection sessions.?

While above are some of challenges or requirements awaiting the knowledge managers in the future, we should also be aware of the role of Technology

Role of technologies (Baddie or Angel of the story)

Technology can be a baddie or angel in this story of KM’s future. Huge developments and innovations are happening in KM related technologies. Some of the key areas in which development is happening is mentioned below:

Search related improvements

• Taxonomy and Non-Taxonomy Driven solutions; Knowledge graphs, Insights engine
• Customised content delivery & insights built based on user requirement
• Chatbots

Digital assistants

• Each employee having their own assistant

Content creation

• Automated content creation.?
• Content created at source of generation

Sharing and collaboration

• Easing sharing and collaboration internally and externally. Lot of innovation is happening in this field

Process automation through automated knowledge embedding

• Applications that track patterns, refine it and automate it

Machine driven generation of new Knowledge

• Insights building tools, like recommendation engine. Mostly data driven new insight development, as well as generating insights from unstructured data and content.

In the above, most of the development is happening areas related to search related improvements and sharing/collaboration.

Problem with KM technology companies

KM technology companies hijacked the KM movement for their benefits. They defined the narration and definitions of KM. Made it appear as a very simple function. This narration was bought in by leaders across organisations. For them KM become just a technology, that needs to be procured and rest everything falls in place.

As KM practitioners we should be aware of this.

So what can be the future of KM

The good part is that while KM movement got hijacked by technology companies, we are finding more and more technology solutions addressing most of the areas around which KM function is operating.?

Let me explain:

1. Identifying and safeguarding critical knowledge: Automated content/knowledge sniffing and content creation tools. Knowledge sniffing driven by knowledge audit. This field is yet to grow.?
2. Capturing and documenting relevant work related information and knowledge and making it easily accessible: Automated content creation and content identification driven by delivery schedules.
3. Facilitating tacit knowledge sharing and collaboration: Social network analysis driven connecting of employees.
4. Enabling generation of new knowledge and innovation through interventions: Insights building tools (They are still evolving, but are promising)
5. Promoting reuse of knowledge, knowledge artefacts through policy, process changes and evangelisation: No specific technology available, but existing technical solutions provided by companies can be used.

The future of KM is bright with realisation across organisations about the importance of KM. However future can go the way technology companies want it to go or the KM fraternity can come together refine/redefine the narration.

We need an intelligent set of knowledge mangers who are clear with the KM basics, are technically sound and understand business very well. Future of KM will grow through them. If it happens, then we will see KM Function doing justice to what it can and build efficient and effective organisations.?