Janet Haven

The NY Times' recent article, "Open-Source Spying", chronicles a knowledge management project writ large. The author discusses the US intelligence community's tentative use of knowledge-sharing tools like blogs and wikis to exchange information across and within agencies in an ad-hoc but powerful way. Given my involvement in several knowledge management projects over the years, I was particularly interested how the agencies' employees described the best use of Intellipedia, the internal wikipedia clone for spooks:

Chris Rasmussen, a 31-year-old “knowledge management” engineer at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency....told me the usefulness of Intellipedia proved itself just a couple of months ago, when a small two-seater plane crashed into a Manhattan building. An analyst created a page within 20 minutes, and over the next two hours it was edited 80 times by employees of nine different spy agencies, as news trickled out. Together, they rapidly concluded the crash was not a terrorist act.

I like this story, because it's talking about knowedge capture as opposed to knowledge sharing. As I think much of the NY Times article makes clear, within organizations that don't have a culture of open information exchange (i.e., most), the idea of knowledge sharing--fetishized by KM geeks--tends to fall flat. It seems to me that sharing is a knock-on effect of capturing information, rather than an activity that people actually undertake. Capture happens most effectively during a real-time event, like the plane crash Chris describes above. Many organizations are using the wiki-capture model to create an editable snapshot of knowledge around a certain event or meeting; one of my favorite organizations to pioneer this approach, Aspiration Tech, has used wikis for event knowledge capture in such diverse areas as e-advocacy and open source usability.

In a hilariously blunt article on organizational knowledge management called "Knowledge Sharing Should be Avoided" from 2004 by James Robertson, an Australian KM guru, the author notes:

Knowledge sharing is certainly an important concept for those in the knowledge management and information management disciplines (ie the readers of this article).

The starting point to moving beyond this terminology, however, is to recognise that it means little to anyone else in the organisation.

(Bolding mine.)

He goes on to note that:

...the concept of knowledge sharing will generate little enthusiasm (and therefore action) amongst staff. In fact, when asked (or instructed) to 'share your knowledge' staff will typically respond with confusion, passive resistance or hostility.

So what's the moral of the story? I think the moral is that intelligence agencies, like so many other big organizations, are not hopelessly behind and totally clueless. The issue, more precisely, is that until very recently the culture of open information was entirely foreign to nearly everyone; communities like Wikipedia have embraced it with vigor, but most organizations are much slower-moving and are peopled with individuals who aren't thinking about knowledge-sharing as their primary task (nor should they be, arguably). Integrating knowledge capture activities into daily work seems like the best way to get people thinking about the advantages of the approach, and of the tools available, because inevitably people will see the benefits. But don't sit back and wait for your people to knowledge-share spontaneously; you'll end up with empty wikis, cranky, confused staff, and skeptics proven right.