Or: How ECM fits into your Knowledge Management and Enterprise Information Management strategies

Jed Cawthorne MBA MBCS CITP

AIIM Info360 Conference 2011

No ECM – No KM !

Slideshare.net version

This is a variant of the slides used in my presentation at the 2011 AIIM Info360 conference

The corporate branding of my employer has been removed from the slides

I have removed a few slides and added some slides with comments – as with any presentation its difficult to provide the full flavor without the “audio track” provided by the presenter at the conference.

My Experience in the ECM field

The Open University: ESA, Mars Express Mission Science Data Archiving Manager, Beagle 2 Lander

The Open University ECM Requirements and procurement Project Manager ECM Implementation Programme Manager

Prescient Digital Media Intranet, CMS, Enterprise Search Consultant

Canadian Tire Corporation Senior KM Specialist

KPMG International Knowledge Manager, Global Quality & Risk Management

My very simple assertion You can not achieve a knowledge enabled

organization without good Information Management; this is independent of your working definition of Knowledge Management

An ECM strategy is key to managing all your unstructured information within an overall Enterprise Information Management strategy.

We need to fill in the gaps We need to fill in some of the gaps in the

pyramid on the next slide.

The pyramid is a simple visualization of the hierarchical progression from atomic items of data, that are transformed via data processing of some sort and have context applied to produce items of information.

Definitions of Knowledge Management Prof. Michael Sutton, Gore School of Business at

Westminster College reported to the 2008 International Conference on Knowledge Management that he had assembled a library of over 100 definitions !

Original definition (?) – Thomas Davenport 1994: “Knowledge management is the process of capturing, distributing and effectively using knowledge”

The point I would like to make, and will illustrate as we move ahead, is that the different definitions, indeed the different schools of thought on KM all still require good information management as an underpinning.

A working definition of KM“KM is an effort to increase useful knowledge within an organization. Ways to do this include encouraging communication, offering opportunities to learn, and promoting the sharing of knowledge objects or artifacts”

Dr Claire McInerny, Knowledge Management and the Dynamic Nature of Knowledge, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 2002

Knowledge Objects or artifacts: documents in an DM repository, institutional records, pages in a wiki, blog articles and comments, web pages on the intranet, emails etc…. In other words not just Knowledge Base entries.

Definitions again ! AIIM definition of ECM:

“Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is the strategies, methods and tools used to capture, manage, store, preserve, and deliver content and documents related to organizational processes. ECM tools and strategies allow the management of an organization's unstructured information, wherever that information exists.”

Strategies and methods to manage, store, preserve etc the ‘knowledge objects’ of the previous definition.

The Stages of KM

Stage 1 – Intranets & Intellectual Capital Stage 2 – Human Relations, cultural dimensions Stage 3 – Content & retrievability Stage 4 – Access to external information

The Stages of KM: C.McInerny & M.Koenig, KM Processes in Organizations, Theoretical Foundations and Practice, Synthesis Lectures on Information Concepts, Retrieval and Services #18, Morgan & Claypool, 2011

Stage 1: Intranets and IC IT driven Intellectual Capital Intranets and extranets Best Practices and Lessons Learned

Stage 2: Human Relations; cultural dimensions Communities of Practice Organizational Culture The Learning Organization (Senge) Tacit Knowledge (Nonaka & Takeuchi – SECI)

Stage 3: Content & Retrievability Structuring content & adding index terms (metadata) Content Management technologies Taxonomies

Stage 4: Access to External Information Firewall-less universal access? Importance of context ‘Social Technologies’ ? KM 2.0 ?

Comment on The Stages of KM Stage 1 – Intranets & Intellectual Capital: heavy IT

emphasis

Stage 2 – Human Relations, cultural dimensions: introducing the key human aspects

Stage 3 – Content & retrievability: introduction of content management related technologies !

Stage 4 – Access to external information: KM 2.0?

David Gurteen coined the term KM 2.0 in his 2007 Information Online Keynote in London. His main point was that KM1.0 failed because it consisted of additional tasks, like making sure you place a document into the RM system, or completed an entry in the separate Knowledge Base system etc. He suggested that web 2.0 / enterprise 2.0 “social” technologies would push forward a new way of looking at KM – hence KM2.0

Return to my simple assertion Going back to my simple assertion, I posit that

whether your organisation is in KM Stage 1 or Stage 4, whether you believe in Nonaka’s SECI theory that you can convert tacit knowledge into explicit and then share it, or whether you believe that only information can be shared; this means to achieve some contextual form of KM in your organisation you need good enterprise information management, and therefore for unstructured information, a good enterprise content management strategy.

So we can revisit the pyramid with the gaps filled in:

The latest KM and ECM fashions….. Thomas Davenport writing recently on the

need for companies to develop a new strategy for knowledge work discusses two approaches: The free access approach The structured provision of knowledge: “In

corporate parlance, such technologies are often called case management systems” 1

For exmaple IBM and EMC now talk about case management in an ECM context

1. Rethinking Knowledge Work: A strategic approach, T. Davenport, McKinsey Quarterly, McKinsey & Company, February 2011

Where ECM fits into KM perspective

My simple assertion revisited

KM requires good EIM, which in turn requires an ECM strategy for unstructured information

Get back to the office and review your strategies and plans, if you have them

Good place to start – a simple information charter:

http://www.intranetfocus.com/about/information-charter

Free learning: Knowledge Technologies in Context from OpenLearn.open.ac.uk

Click on the graphic above to access a free online course !

Jed Cawthorne, MBA MBCS CITPwww.ecm-stuff.blogspot.comwww.twitter.com/jedpchttp://www.cmswire.com/author/jed-cawthorne/

No ECM – No KM !