No business uses? No policies?  I thought this was a violation of the rules everyone learned in the IT 101 course on implementing new technology.  What’s worse is that the survey reports that 26% of the respondents claim that their “implementation is being driven by the the IT department with no input from information management professionals.” If this is true, then in a quarter of all cases, the IT professionals have acted contrary to the restrictions they impose on the rest of their organization.

An astonishing, frightening, and worryingly familiar story.

Check to make sure that your KM program is well managed, with clear goals, vibrant communities of practice, effective use of IT and social media (though without excessive reliance on IT), and valid metrics of the KM program’s contributions.

 That's what you need to do.

What are the causes? Amongst other things

•  
  •  assumption is that the standard practices of traditional management—hierarchy, command-and-control, tightly planned work, competition through economies of scale and cost reduction, impersonal communications—are a success. 
  • view employees as “human resources” i.e. things that can be controlled and manipulated and exploited. 

I recommend the post.

If I may quote the late Carl Sagan on this very problem, "They laughed at Galileo. They laughed at Einstein. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.

... talking about scientific breakthroughs, with reference to "innovative" treatments. cf. Nativis

Sales Managers sit in the middle. They’re the shock absorber in the system. Taking the heat from the C suite on everything the sales guys do. Taking the heat from the sales guys about ineffective marketing, unrealistic pricing, poor customer service or late delivery. In every business, the rubber meets the road with the sales team, and the sales manager navigates a way through everybody’s failings to keep the wheels turning. Without good sales management, turnover of sales people is high, revenue disappoints and low margins show up in the bottom line. And the one who ends up paying for that is most often the CEO, with his or her job.

I'm indebted to @stevenreeves (and his alterego @frontofficebox) for introducing me to the phrase C suite.

As I get older I note with amusement just how many job titles start with "Director", "Head of", "Chiefxx" many of them several levels down from where the buck stops...

Seven Truths:

• Focus on the need, not the technology
• Be a silo buster
• The solution belongs to the users – it doesn’t work in a command-and-control way. If it is done top-down, you have to compel participation. If it’s bottom up, people self-select and much more effective
• What’s in a name? The platform/program should have a distinct name, look and personality. (If it had been just another SharePoint site, it would not have achieved the same level of visibility and interest.)
• Start small, grow fast. They just wanted to help a few communicate and connect. They didn’t intend to create a video backbone.
• Bring in everybody. Make sure you give ways for various types of participants  – contributors, commenters, raters, etc.
• Value? They actually didn’t make a hard ROI business case before launching the program.  However, they have since be able to establish lots of business value.  It speaks for itself.
• Mileage will vary – not every E2.0 effort will have the same impact.  You need to really calibrate your methods and branding to your goals.

Excellent advice, Liveblogged from #e2conf by @VMaryAbraham at Above and Beyond KM

My key points? Focus on the needs, start bottom up, and bring everyone in.

Giving people tools that create more work for them to participate, instead of giving them technology that works so well it becomes part of how they work; and

Wonderful highlight of a technology risk that might affect #km, thank @VMaryAbraham for the link

With a byzantine user experience and long implementation times (think Interwoven, Microsoft SharePoint, Oracle Portal or SAP), social businesses have taken alternative approaches. Blogs and wikis may have lost some of their sexiness, but are being deployed massively, also beyond technology-happy IT users. Social businesses tend to find the right tool for the job and are not afraid to put more than one tool in place.

We're going SP2010, and with a fairly rapid timescale; my fear is the command and control creeping in...