HOW CUTE ARE WE . . .

Confessions of a Business Consultant Hitman

By Alex Hutchins

I recall someone telling me, probably my mother, do not bite the hand that feeds you, and  being the person that I am, had to test this theory; which, I have on multiple occasions found to be absolute and unequivocally true.  However, it has always amazed me how some business consultants can dress a pig up in special clothes so that it appears to be, to the observer, a soft-spoken tooth fairy.

Now I must admit that I have concocted my share of clever phases and acronyms but beneath the italicized phrase in the brochure was a program of substance and not just day-old “meatloaf” warmed up in the microwave.

Where are my comments going?  Well, I will tell you . . .

It seems nowadays, we are going to teach companies how to manage their knowledge and we are going to call it:  Social Knowledge Management or SKM.

How clever and cute is that?

According to Kate Leggett,

“You have to admit that knowledge management (KM) is hard — it’s hard to explain, hard to implement, hard to do right. It’s not just technology. It is a combination of organizational realignment, process change, and technology combined in the right recipe that is needed to make KM successful. And when it is successful, it delivers real results — reduced handle times, increased agent productivity and first closure rates, better agent consistency, increased customer satisfaction.”

Geez Louise, this is nothing more than Operations Management, along with a little Total Quality Management, and some lessons learned from Organizational Behavior.

However, if we were to look at some excerpts from Leading Issues in Social Knowledge Management, copyright 2012, The Authors, we would be able to read the following:

“In the early days of Knowledge Management (KM), KM was primarily about capturing all the messy unstructured information in an organization and making it searchable and easily accessible to employees.”    I suppose this is the knowledge of experience that people carry around with them in their heads.  “But, the key word here is ‘social KM.’”  I guess we are making an attempt to tie this new management concept to “social media?”  “ . . .  it is a very powerful model,”  the authors continue, “as it clearly places responsibility for knowledge sharing and making knowledge productive in the hands of the individual.”  

Al-righty now, and… good luck with that!  I can just imagine employees at all levels in an organization breaking down the doors to share those pieces of information that make them important to an organization, which BTW, keeps them from being fired.

And, even though the internet is blessed with all sorts of links to social knowledge management, the concept is still so new that Wikipedia does not even have a page on it.

But, you can bet your “bottom dollar” that if I was still in the field knocking on doors trying to sell consulting contracts, SKM, would be at the top of my hit list.