Yesterday I was interviewed by Eric Burns from the Babson College Working Knowledge Research Center in Boston. (Tom Davenport and Larry Prusak are the Center Directors). Eric is exploring the links between knowledge management and innovation, and wanted to get a sense of the current status of knowledge management practices in industry. I spoke about my 4-year involvement with TARDIS , which is a knowledge management initiative within the Australian Defence Force. I am one of the developers of TARDIS and have been involved with it since its conception. As such I am very aware that anything I say and write is coloured by my deep and personal involvement. Indeed David Snowden blogged three days ago about this problem. He said – “I have sat in many a conference listening to a presentation from a KM person is a company where the statements about what has happened bear little relation to the reality on the ground.” I pointed this world view problem out to Eric and suggested he may want to speak to some of the users.

Coincidentally, two weeks ago Patrick Lambe invited me to be one of the judges for the Singapore iKMS KM Excellence Awards. He sent some documentation to each of the potential judges for comment. I commented by saying - “We need to understand the organisational motivations and know something about the organisation. … I also think we need to clearly understand the scope and intent of the initiative. A webpage is not knowledge management, nor is a database, and nor is a blog, or a collection of stories. These are enablers and a step along the path. Any initiative should demonstrate a holistic attempt to bring together the people, process and technology elements, for organisational and knowledge worker benefit.”

Well here it is – my first blog. Knowledge Matters™ has been a long time in gestation. I first thought of the name 12 months or so ago. I then looked for a suitable medium and after fiddling with Microsoft FrontPage, Expression Web and SharePoint for a couple of months, I tried Blogger and Moveable Type, before settling on Drupal. But I digress.

Why Knowledge Matters™? I have always privileged formal education, while at the same recognising there is no substitute for experience, and I truly believe knowledge matters in everything we do. Knowledge Matters™ is a precise enough name to capture my interest in knowledge management, and loose enough for me to write on just about anything providing I keep a knowledge theme. That said I do intend to write with some thematic structure, and I don’t intend to blog my holidays and social activities!

So what is my thematic structure? Well I am going to write about knowledge work, knowledge productivity™, and knowledge management. I will define each of these in coming blogs. My current interest is network analysis and how it might be used as a project management tool to picture knowledge and understand risks. I have been careful to use the term ‘network analysis’ rather than ‘social network analysis’, ‘organisational network analysis’ or ‘value network analysis’, so there is at least four blogs around this theme alone. I am also writing a doctorate in and around these themes so I explore ideas in this medium. I hope your contributions will challenge and inspire me!

And finally I have a passionate interest in Celtic music, specifically bagpipes and bagpipe music. There is a dying oral tradition associated with learning bagpipes, and for me this decay matters. Every day I see humanity make huge forward steps, but are we as individuals any cleverer? What knowledge are we losing? Does this knowledge loss matter? I think it does, so from time to time I will blog on these topics, and therefore I seek your indulgence if you visit this blog for other reasons.

I hope you now understand what I am trying to achieve and your appetite is sufficiently whet for you to visit again. You now have the knowledge to make that decision, so in a small way I have shown you why knowledge matters.

Regards, Graham.