In case anybody reading this blog doesn’t already know, I work in knowledge management. As a discipline, it hasn’t really been around that long — Wikipedia suggests it’s been an established discipline since 1995.
So let’s assume for a moment that knowledge management itself is a meme — one that really started to pick up around 1995. Well, the web certainly wasn’t as popular in 1995 as it is now, so it’s a bit difficult to determine the popularity of the phrase then, but take a look at the graph below from Google Trends.
While news about knowledge management has remained roughly the same, searches for the phrase “knowledge management” have dropped off dramatically since 2004. The real question is: why?
To hypothesize a bit, let’s look compare two other examples we’ve already looked at (”leeroy jenkins” and “series of tubes“) in order to make a comparison.
The first and most obvious thing to notice is that all three memes show a gradual decline (with “series of tubes” being the least gradual of the three). This shows us that all three of these memes have become less popular (if we directly attribute popularity to the volume of searches for a particular phrase).
But also notice that “leeroy jenkins” doesn’t even show up in the Google news sources. This of course doesn’t mean that the meme wasn’t wildly popular, which we can clearly see from the number of searches for the phrase (in fact, we can clearly see that “leeroy jenkins” was much more popular, and still is, than “series of tubes”).
This of course, makes sense. The quote “a series of tubes” was from an Alaskan politician, which would have made it into more mainstream news sources (which would be indexed by Google as news sources for Google Trends), whereas our good friend Leeroy Jenkins was merely a World of Warcraft character (who would have a hard time getting quoted in a major newspaper I would imagine).
But if we look at what this means for knowledge management, the trend would look ostensibly grim. It would appear that less and less people care about what knowledge management is, and are therefore not bothering to search for the phrase. This looks like bad news.
The alternative explanation however, is that most people already know what knowledge management is — and that that explains the drop off in searches. What do you think?
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April 27th, 2008 at 4:23 pm
I found your site on google blog search and read a few of your other posts. Keep up the good work. Just added your RSS feed to my feed reader. Look forward to reading more from you.
- Sue.
April 27th, 2008 at 4:24 pm
Thanks Sue! Glad you’re enjoying the blog.
June 25th, 2008 at 12:02 pm
hi Lucas,
I believe one reason for the decline of the term “knowledge management” might be because now there are more specialized term such as “ontologies”, “concept maps”, etc. However, one can definitely argue that these terms are too specialized and used only within academia and not by mainstream news publishers. My feeling the importance of “knowledge management” has only increased by the terminology has changed or even became too specialized. And then there is classic philosophical problem with defining knowledge :).
Good blog, enjoyed reading..
June 25th, 2008 at 3:46 pm
Thanks for your comment Ritesh, and I’m glad you’ve enjoyed the blog.
I would argue that words phrases like “concept map” or words like “ontology” are not everyday parlance for the average business executive — and I really doubt they ever will be. I think you’re right on the money when you say that these are academic words that have little relevance to your ordinary business stakeholder, whose primary concern is “how is an ontology going to make/save us money?”.
To be useful, knowledge management needs to be innovative, but also be something that people can relate too — a discipline that speaks to an already-existing part of people’s understanding and vocabularies. As with the growth of any discipline, sub-specializations develop (each with their own vocabularies and methods), yet the key is to strike a balance between specificity and clarity. Simply put, let’s not call things something new just for the sake of wowing someone with a new word.
Thanks again for your comment and for stopping by.
August 27th, 2008 at 2:16 am
Good research Lucas.
I think KM needs de-jaronizing and definitely some innovation.
Like any other new concept, technology companies just hijaked the KM concept in late 90’s and made it technology centric, and companies just went about implementing KM related technologies like EIP, ECM, CoPs etc like any other technology they used (ERP, CRM , SCM) and expecting it to work, and obviously most of them failed to leverage it. The same is happening now with Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0/E-Learning 2.0…
The need is to preach the concept more as a discipline which combines tech and Non-tech initiatives, which should focus on process integration and above all KM technologies need to improve on usability rather than more feature richness, else failure rates of KM initiatives will keep rising but tech companies will surely make their bucks!
August 29th, 2008 at 5:53 pm
Agreed Sumeet. In my mind, KM consists of 3 parts: technology, processes and people. The technology chosen to fulfill a particular role will almost certainly fail unless the other 2 are looked after. I think the reason that companies push the tech angle is that processes and people are tough to do — and most often far more profitable to push out a new technology than to adapt an old process (not to mention the people who decide where money should be spent are not always thrilled to spend money on process re-engineering).