{"id":1877,"date":"2014-07-07T08:01:12","date_gmt":"2014-07-07T06:01:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.socialenterprise.it\/?p=1877"},"modified":"2014-07-07T08:01:12","modified_gmt":"2014-07-07T06:01:12","slug":"the-collaborative-knowledge-ecosystem-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.socialenterprise.it\/index.php\/2014\/07\/07\/the-collaborative-knowledge-ecosystem-2\/","title":{"rendered":"The Collaborative Knowledge Ecosystem"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Since the seventies\u00a0and for a number of\u00a0decades,\u00a0Knowledge Management<\/a>\u00a0has represented\u00a0a real obsession for private companies, public institutions and non-profit organizations. Thanks to dedicated skills, newly born responsibilities and technology based solutions the collection, transfer and re-use of knowledge assets have long been considered levers to drive\u00a0performance, differentiation and innovation.Unfortunately this massive market-wide effort has\u00a0delivered very limited practical outcomes convincing\u00a0more than one author to\u00a0claim<\/a>\u00a0the dead<\/a>\u00a0of knowledge management.<\/p>\n

While the overall idea of extracting knowledge from employees’ brain and saving\u00a0it for organization’s benefit has met substantial roadblocks, the need to let solutions, best practices, templates and other valuable\u00a0project\u00a0artifacts flow across departments is surely not gone. Learning from failed attempts,\u00a0knowledge management is thus\u00a0back under a new moniker and for\u00a0dramatically different business reasons:<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Among its many merits, the\u00a0excellent work of John Hagel<\/a>\u00a0has clarified how knowledge comes in two flavors,\u00a0stocks<\/strong>\u00a0and\u00a0flows<\/strong>:<\/p>\n

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“As the world speeds up, stocks of knowledge depreciate at a faster rate…. In more stable times, we could sit back and relax once we had learned something valuable, secure that we could generate value from that knowledge for an indefinite period. Not anymore. To succeed now, we have to continually refresh our stocks of knowledge by participating in relevant flows of new knowledge.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Stocks are mostly about static, codified, explicit knowledge. Flows are much more related to fresh, fluid, constantly changing tacit knowledge that comes\u00a0from the edge of the organization to face increasingly complex\u00a0customer expectations and competition from adjacent markets, startups and dramatically different business models.<\/p>\n

In the past, knowledge stocks have\u00a0represented valid sources of both competitive advantage and operational efficiency. Even today they are perfectly fine as long as your business is mostly predictable, repeatable and linear.\u00a0Under such conditions, individuals and teams’ responsibility is all about\u00a0collecting what the firm\u00a0knows and organizing it in a way that is easy to\u00a0understand, find and use<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Nowadays most companies aren’t anyway that\u00a0lucky. Their work is first and most of\u00a0all about\u00a0improvisation, tailored solutions and reinventing themselves every single day.\u00a0With John Hagel’s words, it’s not knowing what but knowing how. Answers to customer requests don’t\u00a0come\u00a0in the forms of ready-made\u00a0documents or repositories but through a creative connection, conversation and confrontation.\u00a0Knowledge decay\u00a0is so fast\u00a0as to require\u00a0constant adaptation and perpetual learning\u00a0<\/strong>through communities of practice, internal social networks, groups of experts, distributed decision making.\u00a0<\/strong>Trust along\u00a0the hierarchy and even across company’s boundaries thus enables collaborative\u00a0creation of fresh knowledge.\u00a0More than efficiency, having\u00a0the right information\u00a0at the right time in the right place unlocks agility and innovation.<\/p>\n

What happens though when, as in most real world situations, both static and dynamic knowledge are required?\u00a0How do they influence each other? How to best\u00a0apply\u00a0knowledge assets to the day-by-day work?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Knowledge follows a full life cycle<\/strong>\u00a0that goes from creation, to codification, transfer and application. Different flavors are complementary, interact and build one on top of the other.<\/p>\n

The low hanging fruit\u00a0of knowledge\u00a0sharing is of course operational improvement as knowledge stocks provide guidance, help and critical information to get the job done. Nonetheless there is much more than this:<\/p>\n