The trigger for this post is an interesting article from Atul Rai here. Atul articulates that from a ‘tacit knowledge sharing’ perspective (call it Web 2.0 or social networking if you have to) communication is probably not that relevant. He cites the SMS and twitter phenomenon has changed the way we communicate as people. Fair point - SMS hs chnged rules qt a bit & its nrml fr cnvrstns 2b lk ths.
But is communication all about the way we write, or speak. Isn’t their more to it? Bloody well yes, communication is about effectively transmitting a message from a sender to a receiver. While articulation (for traditional, ‘explict’ kind of KM) requires good writing skills, and for Web 2.0 kind of KM it does not, the realm of communication is much beyond articulation alone!
‘Communication skills’ is about an understanding of what mediums work best to be able to most effectively ‘transmit’ information. As Knowledge Management, or Knowledge Sharing professionals isn’t our job to create an environment conducive for effective collaboration? How people collaborate, what appeals to them and what doesn’t - including the medium (say Web 2.0) and language (say twitter/SMS kind) - is something that will fall in the communication realm for sure.
Of course you can argue that it really is about understanding human behavior, but ‘communicating’ with humans effectively to get the desired behavior is key, and ‘that’ definitely is the task of a master communicator.
In a corporate setup you’re trying to reach out to employees for a whole lot of reasons. Employee engagement, knowledge management, information dissemination and a whole lot of other things. Poor employee! There are too many voices, too much clutter, too much confusion. Why can’t we have one voice, why can’t we align the communicators and the knowledge managers? Is it because the knowledge managers think more in terms of processes and systems while communicators more in terms of info bytes? But isn’t knowledge management just a name now - is it not about knowledge sharing - sharing of knowledge bytes. Isn’t Web 2.0 breaking the structures and the processes out of KM? If yes, then aren’t communicators and knowledge managers inadvertently converging at “employee engagement”? Both trying to make sure employees know what they need to, and tell what they ought to…
Think about it. And if you agree, then well do you really need knowledge managers anymore? Isn’t it better to have a bunch of people who understand human behavior and the mechanics of bringing people together (broadly in the realm of employee engagement) run the show? Isn’t that very close to what communicators typically are anyway expected to do?
Footnote 1: Of course some technology may be involved in setting the mechanics up - but that can always be outsourced.
Footnote 2: I do a dedicated “KM” job as well, and am at an equal risk of losing my job if people buy in to what I said!
on Oct 15th, 2008 at 5:56 pm
interesting thought, Sameer … in fact, i think we have been doing this for some time now, without even knowing it.
brings out another interesting dimension … if KM is about employee engagement (in some respect), then should it be the focal point for employee engagement? after all, employee engagement is more and more about knowledge today.
on Oct 31st, 2008 at 5:24 pm
A thought that runs thru the mind :Doctors bring babies into the world, but its the mothers who actually bring them and then the fathers also come into the picture. But, one can do without the doctor, one can also do without the father and in the end, even a female is not required, technology lets you bring a baby into the world without all the 3 except you need them as catalysts or the channels thru which the baby thought evolves into being! And note the change “a mother to a female” But does anything at all really change?
So although the importance or timing of roles may change, the responsibilities that a communicator and a Knowledge Manager perform only grow, they do not diminish.
Like any living organism, that adapts to change or perishes if it can’t, so too will Knowledge Managers adapt to the change with the introduction of Web 2.0. We become the observers and the connectors, the channels of guding people to the mechanisms, while the communicators can only help the flow and what flows not the how.
With the advent of TV people thot the radio would die, with the advent of Internet people thot books would die- but neither did the readers/announcers nor authors/novelists die. They just changed the “channel”:-)