WHY KM INITIATIVES FAIL!

[21 January 2007 - Gurteen Knowledge-Letter - UK] I recently spent an hour or so with several senior managers of a large organization talking about their new KM initiative. After the session I e-mailed the knowledge manager some advise. Its quite generic but sums up my thoughts on why so many KM initiatives fail and so I thought I'd share them on my blog. Since then I have also seen someone asking in a forum "how do you get people to collaborate?" and "how do you change the mindset of people?". As I explain in my blog posting such questions are poor questions in that they are not specific enough! Jason Bates in my Forum commenting on the question "how should worker productivity be better managed?" answers in a similar vein by effectively saying "well it all depends" and goes on to say: "It's a personal bug bear of mine that some KM'ers persist in abstracting problems to conceptual levels that make business people groan and roll their eyes." More