What can the digital workplace learn from knowledge management?
More than 100 participants came together at the 8th KnowledgeCamp of the GfWM on 14 and 15 September 2017 at the new campus of the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam. The Department of Information Sciences hosted the event and Prof Peter Heisig, Professor of Information and Knowledge Management, welcomed the participants from commercial enterprises, public administration, research and science with a reflection on the experiences of knowledge management over the last 25 years against the backdrop of current developments and initiatives for digital transformation:
"From the perspective of knowledge management, advancing digitalisation represents a huge codification of singular actions and permanent changes in the physical and virtual environment. The challenge is to draw meaningful insights, i.e. information and knowledge, from these huge amounts of data and to decide and act on this basis. A certain amount of prior knowledge is of particular importance here, which suggests a reversal of the classic hierarchy of data-information-knowledge.
The overemphasis on codification, such as so-called knowledge databases, in the early years of knowledge management led to exaggerated expectations of WM and at the same time caused high costs. The digital workplace can learn from the failures of WM, recognise its limitations and thus reduce the risk of bad investments. At the same time, digitalisation also presents opportunities to generate knowledge from data, although this is still in its infancy. It is important here that, for example, prejudices are not replicated in the algorithms when using predictive analytics, as initial examples from the USA show. Programmes used to combat crime show that skin colour leads to discriminatory statements against people with black skin. Incidentally, this can now be seen in the documentary film 'Pre-Crime' by Matthias Heeder and Monika Hielsche in the cinema."
A total of 46 sessions were offered and requested by the participants. The topics ranged from questions about "Professionalisation in knowledge management - questions about training?", "Revision of ISO 9001:2015 - WM in quality management", "Experiences with MS365 in the distributed, global product development of an automotive supplier", "Social intranet for 300,000 employees", "Knowledge transfer in the Berlin Administration", "Generating knowledge in the digital world" and an exchange of experiences on "How's your wiki?".
At the end of the first day, the GfWM Horizon Speech was on the programme. Under the title "Managing Knowledge in the Age of Digitalisation" (watch his presentation on the GfWM YouTube channel), Prof. Eric Tsui from Hong Kong Polytechnic University highlighted the opportunities offered by digitalisation and the possibilities of cloud-based knowledge services:
"Digitalisation offers not only storage, retrieval of data but also enables data to be, among others, compared, summarised, reasoned and presented. Successful cloud implementation of social and enterprise systems embed not only data, information and clusters of computing resources but also people and connections. Such data and connections, when properly mined in the cloud, shed light on the development of new business models. Twenty first century organisations have to increasingly position themselves to orchestrate and deliver their business based on cloud-based knowledge services."
In the second keynote speech, Dr Peter Geißler, Head of Digital Workplace at Communardo GmbH, addressed the importance of human factors for successful digitalisation in organisations, such as leadership, culture and teamwork, under the title "Digital Workplace starts in the mind".
The feedback from participants at this year's KnowledgeCamp was very positive in terms of the exchange of experiences, the networking and the perfect organisation and location in Potsdam. The 12 regional groups in Germany and Austria and the GfWM's 12 specialist groups enable the continuation of the direct exchange of experience and distributed community work on important specialist knowledge management topics. The tried and tested format of the KnowledgeCamp is also to be further developed to take account of the further development of the field in research and practice. Knowledge management enthusiasts can therefore look forward to KnowledgeCamp 2018.
Potsdam, September 2017
