I think most knowledge management practitioners would agree that part of their job is to educate users and management types about the possibilities of a successful knowledge management program. But what happens when the knowledge management practitioner doesn’t agree with where the business wants to go with KM?

When I talk about users in this context, there’s a bunch of different groups I’m talking about. Knowledge management implementations usually end up with a host of technologies being put in place (content management systems, enterprise search engines, collaboration tools, etc.) — and ‘users’ usually end up being any group of people that has to interact with these systems.

When you end up asking users what they want, you usually get a few consistent answers (a search engine that looks and acts like Google usually comes up, or less time looking for templates and other often-used documents), and then a smaller proportion of very diverse answers.

KM’s response to users usually goes a little something like this: while we’d love to give you what you want, it’s really not that simple — there are a multitude of other things to consider (metadata, that kind of thing). In other words: we’re working on it.

Looking at these answers however, they all tend to have something in common. Users are usually asking for reduced complexity — and it’s not necessarily something they think, it’s something they feel. And it’s worth us thinking about.

Before moving forward with any KM technology or other hands-on implementation, it’s often worth contemplating whether we’re reducing complexity for the users of that technology, or making their work lives more complicated than they already are.

Ironically, there are complexity-reducing tools that often get overlooked. Templates are a great example — few people would think of creating a few templates as ‘knowledge management’ (it would most likely get lumped in the sometimes-ephemeral category of ‘content management’). But users often see these types of initiatives as being those that reduce complexity the most for them, thereby making them perceive them as a big win.

Workflow analysis is another great way to figure out where complexity can be reduced. After analyzing workflow processes and patterns, you can then start trimming the fat — making life easier for end users.

As I mentioned a little earlier, metadata’s a tougher nut to crack. The overall goal for any integration of metadata into a content management lifecycle should be increased findability — but the key is to make the gains from increased findability more than the loss of having to capture and codify documents or other content through that metadata.

This is a good approach to take when initially trying to determine (or when reviewing) what metadata you feel you need to capture to make documents easy to locate — the idea being not to go overboard with all kinds of metadata that are tough to capture but that you don’t really need. It’s a tough balance to strike, but if you keep the idea of reduced complexity in mind, it certainly makes things easier.