I was interviewed a few weeks back by Rob Lewis of HR Zone who was writing an article on why HR are not that involved with KM. Overall its not a bad little article though some of my words are not quite what I said. Interestingly he did not ask me to review the article before it was published though to be fair he was in a hurry.
One key point he missed was that although I said I thought HR might be a logical place to drive KM within an organization, I also feared it would be the kiss of death for KM, as In my experience I never felt that HR were really interested in people or in the business - well at least not in the KM sense and this might just explain their lack of involvement!
But one piece of advise in the article (not mine I might add) that I did totally disagree with was this:
Write your own Yellow Pages -- One of the simplest ways of sharing knowledge is to let your organization know where they can find it. Writing a corporate directory of employee expertise may be a pain, but it'll be a lot easier than trying to get them to enter it into a database on their own.
It might be easier but it will be for ever out of date and little used. No one wants to undertaken this chore. The only way a Yellow Pages system will work is where people see the value and keep their profiles updated themselves. I think Corporate Yellow Pages also need to learn a lesson or two from MySpace, FaceBook and other Social Networking platforms where people are given a wide array of tools to personalize their home page and to link with other people and activities.
In other words, help people see the value, make it easy, make it social and make it fun and people will update their own entries.
The Gurteen Knowledge Search Engine is a customised Google search engine that searches over 800 KM related websites and weblogs.
David Gurteen
Quietening the audience at KM Brasil, August 2008
I help people to share their knowledge; to learn from each other; to innovate and to work together effectively to make a difference!
