I thought my post about the potential decline of knowledge management on my other blog, memetiks.com, might interest my readers here. While I suggested in that post that the declining searches on Google Trends may be due to an increased understanding of what KM is about, I’m still reminded of the knowledge management as nonsense argument.

Knowledge management, in its purest, distilled form, was always about (or should have been about) making things simpler for people (yes, I’m being very liberal with my interpretation here). It would seem, however, that in its present incarnation, KM is rarely making things simpler for people.

Part of the problem seems to be that we, as knowledge management folk, assume that people want to know what KM is (or perhaps we just hope they care). Funny thing is, they don’t really care. They care about being better at their job.

There are two intrinsic dangers to KM as I see it: technocentricity and trendiness.

Silly as it sounds, adding technology to people’s lives is often perceived as interfering with the way they do things. Now, don’t get me wrong, there are times when people need a kick in the pants — but they’re never happy about getting that kick in the pants. And give them a kick in the pants too often, and they’ll be none too happy about it.

Combine this technocentricity with a tendency to embrace the latest trends (for better or worse), and a frightening picture starts to develop. People in organizations often can’t understand why there aren’t basic things in place — like templates for presentations or web-based access to their email.

So when these same people are propositioned with wikis, blogs and various other ‘KM’ tools, they see them for what they are: a shot in the dark. Tackling fundamental information flow problems in an organization is tough work, and often, it’s easier to throw a wiki together than try to map out real problems.

We, as knowledge management folks, love to build cathedrals — and hate to build sorely-need sewers.