Roots and Shoots and the KM Stumbling Point

Great session of the IKMU yesterday at UNICEF, congratulations to all who put it together, it was a terrific education for me.

I was lucky enough to share a table with representatives from the Health group, the Emergency supply group, from Water and sanitation and Gender rights. It was quite an eye-opener after corporate law and business consulting.

We spent time delving into what these groups use in order to create, diseminate and use Knowledge more effectively and of course, what the challenges are to the above.

A theme that resounded for me was the disparate and decentralized nature of the resources available, the lack of clarity about what and who the resources were and, how to find this information when it was really needed and, as I am learning at UNICEF, when things are really needed, they really are needed.

So my take-away was that, like many other organizations (law firms too) KM has taken root as a bottom up activity with very little profile on the top down radar.

This is a great way to get things going but at a certain point it always stumbles.

You know this point has been reached when the lack of KM responsibilities in people's formal job titles, lack of prescription or formal support in the use of tools and the ongoing lack of funds to do more than simply build a web site staffed by volunteers, become a barrier to the organization doing anything more than KM by Silo.

UNICEF has a recently declared mandate of ten strategic goals, one of which includes investment in Knowledge Mangement and so it seems reasonable to suppose that there is now the top down will to move beyond the stumbling point.

Time will tell.