Is knowledge management hard to do? A seemingly simple question, with a variety of complex answers.

Jack Vinson at Knowledge Jolt with Jack recently posted my tips on successful knowledge management on his site (thanks Jack!). He pointed out that he had previously posted on how knowledge management was quite difficult to do and why that was the case(in contrast to my own statement that knowledge management was easy).

So who’s right? Well, in this case, I think we both are. Now, before you conclude that I’m just being diplomatic, I think I can explain why that’s the case.

Existing organizational complexities make knowledge management difficult. Knowledge management (as well as any other innovative business process) tends to be easier to do in a smaller organization.

Why? Because larger organizations also have increased organizational complexities and more processes in place to try to manage change. Most of the time, managing and mediating change is a good thing, but in the case of innovation, it’s just another roadblock that needs to be overcome.

So ultimately, it’s not knowledge management itself that is difficult, but it’s the processes put in place that must be harnessed in order to effectively enable knowledge management.

Knowledge management works best from the beginning. It’s often the case in knowledge management projects that an organization is attempting to retrofit it’s current knowledge processes and infrastructure.

But knowledge management is not really a project. It’s a way of doing things. And the easiest way to enable knowledge management to be built into those processes is to do so from the very beginning when the processes are created.