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Overview: The Social Life of KM Tools 55
An organization or community can be said to be at Level 1 of KM infrastructure
complexity if it uses not more than one family of digital KM tools. This includes the
many organizations that have just made the leap from paper to digital document management
systems (Level 1A, e.g., the airline Go which was acquired by easyJet) or the
innumerable communities of professionals, hobbyists, and activists who use basic
e-mail lists for knowledge networking (Level 1B).
Level 0 organizations use no digital KM tools, but instead use other traditional
ones like paper documents, libraries, co-located collaboration, and face-to-face mentoring
arrangements. This has serious implications for scalability, efficiency, and
reusability of knowledge in such organizations and has caused a lot of concern,
particularly in the emerging economies of the world. (More on that in the next
section.)
If an organization or community uses two families of digital KM tools, it can
be said to be at Level 2 of KM infrastructure complexity. For instance, the Unilever
case study features the use of content and computational tools for creative brainstorming,
but collaborative activities still take place largely face-to-face (Level 2B).
Organizations which weigh in on different sides of the codification versus personalization
debate may choose to place more emphasis on one or the other family of KM
tools.
An organization or community which uses all three families of KM tools can be
said to be at Level 3 of KM infrastructure complexity. Most of the larger organizations
profiled in this book are at Level 3; they provide a wide range of tools for their knowledge
workers around the world, but also invest heavily in technology integration,
change management, and capacity building for using these tools. See Table 1.13 for a
comparison of these three levels; more case studies and analysis would be needed to
tease apart the distinctions among Level 3 organizations.
Table 1.13
Levels of Complexity of KM Infrastructure
Level of complexity
of KM infrastructure
Characteristics Examples
Level 0 No digital KM tools are Paper documents, copresent
located collaboration,
face-to-face mentoring
Level 1 Only one family of KM Content management
tools is present tools or messaging/
groupware
Level 2 Two families of KM tools Digital publishing + search,
are present content management +
(e.g., content and
collaboration or
content and
computation)
groupware
Level 3 All families of KM tools Content management +
are present search + groupware
Source: Author.