The requirements of organizational knowledge management (KM) have changed dramatically. Yet, many in the failing KM Establishment cling to outdated motives, methods, objectives and practices. It is so bad, they are even trying to create KM Standards for organizations of the 1990s!

It is counterproductive and problematic to continue to focus on KM used for organizations of a generation ago. The world has moved on. So have enterprise knowledge requirements.

For example, at Xerox, in the 1990s, they identified a list of ten key enterprise knowledge initiatives. As a leader in knowledge management in the mid-1990s, many of their efforts and case studies were the vanguard of enterprise KM. The Xerox KM priorities list was as follows.

• Sharing knowledge and best practices
• Instilling responsibility for sharing knowledge
• Capturing and reusing past experiences
• Embedding knowledge in product, services and processes
• Producing knowledge as a product
• Driving knowledge generation for innovation
• Mapping networks of experts
• Building and mining customer knowledge bases
• Understanding and measuring the value of knowledge
• Leveraging intellectual assets

Since then, 20-years hence, many of these practices have been mastered by applied information technology. Still others no longer represent the contemporary view of knowledge management. Still others were tried and found to be useless.

What happen in the intervening 20 or so years? Well, for one, the Information Revolution (1957-2007) ended. (BTW, we won!) Then firms like Google and Salesforce appeared. Strategies like cloud-computing and enterprise social media emerged.

Many of these so-called knowledge-based activities were routine information systems management. They were product development features, not KM. We may cross them off the list.

• Sharing knowledge and best practices
• Instilling responsibility for sharing knowledge
• Capturing and reusing past experiences
• Embedding knowledge in product, services and processes
• Producing knowledge as a product
• Driving knowledge generation for innovation
• Mapping networks of experts
• Building and mining customer knowledge bases
• Understanding and measuring the value of knowledge
• Leveraging intellectual assets

Meanwhile, other KM initiatives, circa 1990s, were just plain hubris. They had no meaning or context for business or for anyone really. Many were irrelevant and simple inventions of smug KM consultants.

For example, ‘best practices’ and ‘experts’ are no longer part of the modern KM canon or vernacular. Same goes for vague notions of measurement like ‘value of knowledge,’ ‘sharing’ or ‘knowledge capture.’ Claimed KM practices for simple organizational information syndication, discovery and retrieval may also be summarily removed from the list.

• Sharing knowledge and best practices
• Instilling responsibility for sharing knowledge
• Capturing and reusing past experiences
• Driving knowledge generation for innovation
• Mapping networks of experts
• Understanding and measuring the value of knowledge
• Leveraging intellectual assets

What’s left is the essential, critical core of the knowledge-based enterprise. These core KM activities are the true contribution of 21st Century knowledge leadership. KM must furnish continuous, fundamental advancements in these core activities. They truly unlock organizational potential. KM must look back to move forward. KM is about knowledge creation. The key book that created KM, published in 1991, was called, “The Knowledge Creating Company.”

• Instilling responsibility for knowledge – The contemporary version of this activity is brokering structural holes. Knowledge leaders prosper by revealing, cultivating and coordinating transorganizational knowledge, collective intelligence and learning from the emerging future.
  
• Driving knowledge generation for innovation – This is Back-to-the-Future for the original purpose of KM – knowledge creation. Deliberate, proven KM such as the practice-of-community, distributed phronesis, situated cognition, conversation and narrative are essential knowledge creating activities.
• Mapping networks – The logic of network analysis, complexity science and graph visualization is the foundation of knowledge and the new lingua franca of business performance and productivity. These essential concepts allow organizations to reveal, comprehend, connect and serve their critical knowledge networks, both within and across organizational boundaries.

Focusing on these three new/old KM strategies will sharply advance organizational knowledge capacity and positive outcomes. In short, these key initiatives return KM to is proper organizational role of knowledge creation. They allow KM to Create the Future!