30th Year: 1,000 Blog Posts, 30 Lessons Learned

Published March 24, 2025

This is my 1,000th post since I started blogging in February 2006 on Line56.com (now defunct). In February 2007, I moved the blog to hp.com. When I left HP in 2008, I switched to Twitter.

In June 2014, I started publishing LinkedIn Articles for posts longer than my LinkedIn Posts. In July 2023, I started a LinkedIn Newsletter: Profiles in Knowledge.

My first Quora answer was to What are some recommendations for good social media and/or digital marketing conferences to attend? in January 2011. When Quora began offering blogs, I started one in November 2016.

Lucidea began publishing my content in October 2016 with KM Adoption Can be Increased Through Gamification Techniques. My first blog post for Lucidea was in May 2017.

I began using Medium to restore my Line56 and hp.com blog posts in March 2015. I now use it to make a copy of every post from every other platform.

If you would like to keep up with all of my writing, I invite you to subscribe to my LinkedIn, Medium, and Substack publications:

My Monthly LinkedIn Newsletter: Profiles in KnowledgeMy Medium BlogMy Weekly Substack Newsletter: Fave Five — Books, Food, Music, Sports, and Humor

On the occasion of post number 1,000, I am taking the opportunity to reflect. This is my 30th year as a knowledge manager, so I am sharing 30 lessons learned during this time. They are grouped under the six books I have written and the one I will publish later this year.

Book Number 1: Implementing a Successful Knowledge Management Program (2007)

1. Knowledge management doesn’t happen until somebody reuses something. When I tell people that my field is called “knowledge management,” most of them have not heard of it before. I explain that knowledge management allows people in an organization to become aware of what others have already learned and done. The real value of KM is when lessons learned and proven practices are reused to avoid reinventing the wheel or making the same mistakes twice. And when concepts are reused in new and better ways, this is innovation.

2. Knowledge Management has never been institutionalized. It is not a given like Finance, HR, or Legal. Business schools don’t prescribe its existence. KM programs come and go, KM teams get moved around in organizations, and KM often suffers the first cuts made in lean times. The field of KM is neither growing nor shrinking; it stays about the same as programs are started up and eliminated in equal measure.

3. KM is a broad field with lots of subcategories. I have defined 50 components, 100 specialties, and 265 topics. It is not possible to master all of its elements, so certification in KM is not meaningful. It’s better to develop expertise in one of its 100 specialties than to claim to be proficient in the entire field.

4. We are fascinated by what is new, but tried and true approaches can be more effective. The current example is Generative AI, but in the past, there were portals, blogs, wikis, the semantic web, enterprise social networks, expertise locators, big data, mashups, and “new and improved” search tools. These all showed potential but eventually lost their luster. Communities, taxonomy, FAQs, peer assists, and stories have been around for a long time, and can still be valuable if used effectively.

5. We have most of the tools we need to be successful in KM, but not all of us use them wisely. Examples include installing new search tools instead of improving findability, collecting documents in repositories instead of connecting people in communities, and rolling out new tools instead of figuring out how to use existing ones for new purposes.

6. Many knowledge managers don’t practice KM, either effectively or at all. Some of us are bad at searching, participating in communities, and reusing what has already been proven. Many don’t learn from mistakes, either their own or those of others. They don’t spend time learning about the field, they rely on others to do the actual work, and they fail to lead by example.

7. Innovation is easy to talk about but is harder to actually do. Most organizations are in favor of increasing innovation, but merely collecting ideas is insufficient; implementing those ideas is what counts.

8. Knowledge retention efforts need to start well before employees are about to leave. It’s a good idea to allow those who depart to stay connected as part of communities to which they belonged before leaving.

9. Fads, bromides, and myths spread more readily, widely, and quickly than good thinking. Three examples are maturity models, the DIKW pyramid, and personality tests.

10. Metrics are often collected for their own sake. There are three main reasons to collect metrics:

To take action based on what the numbers indicate.To track and communicate progress against goals.To persuade others, answer typical questions, and refute baseless assertions.

11. The effectiveness of enterprise search can be enhanced by curating answers. This includes providing best bets, quick answers, authoritatively badged content, and tags.

12. Artificial intelligence can be of extraordinary benefit, but only if compelling use cases are developed and actualized.

13. You need at least one full-time person to lead KM, but a small team can be better than a large one, and KM should report to a neutral organization such as Operations.

Book Number 2: Proven Practices for Promoting a Knowledge Management Program (2017)

14. Selling KM within an organization is an ongoing responsibility. Proven practices for doing so include:

Defining the essentials.Laying the foundation.Obtaining leadership commitment.Educating stakeholders.Communicating to stakeholders.Building a team.Getting outside help.Embracing technology appropriately.Improving continuously.Nurturing a knowledge-sharing culture.Recognizing and rewarding for desired behaviors.Using the keys to success.Avoiding the top 40 pitfalls.Applying lessons learned.Reusing proven practices.Book Number 3: Handbook of Community Management: A Guide to Leading Communities of Practice (2020)

15. Communities are the killer app of knowledge management. Threaded discussions are the killer app of communities. Email integration is the killer functionality of threaded discussions.

16. There are ten principles for successful communities:

Communities should be independent of organization structure; they are based on what members want to interact on.Communities are different from teams; they are based on topics, not on assignments.Communities are not sites, team spaces, blogs or wikis; they are people who choose to interact.Community leadership and membership should be voluntary; you can suggest that people join, but should not force them to.Communities should span boundaries; they should cross functions, organizations, and geographic locations.Redundancy should be minimized in communities; before creating a new one, check if an existing community already addresses the topic.Communities need a critical mass of members; take steps to build membership.Communities should start with as broad a scope as is reasonable; separate communities can be spun off if warranted.Communities need to be actively nurtured; community leaders need to create, build, and sustain communities.Communities can be created, led, and supported using TARGETs: Types, Activities, Requirements, Goals, Expectations, and Tools.

17. Community threaded discussions yield success stories for communities. These can be mined, collected, and used to show the value of communities.

18. People want their own communities but preventing redundant and niche communities is essential.

19. Communities let expertise emerge. To locate expertise, communities can be relied on instead of investing in expertise locators and skills inventories. Communities will always come through with answers to questions, but you may need to nudge them occasionally.

20. The 90–9–1 rule of thumb of participation inequality is actually more like 95–4–1. This is a law of nature. Instead of trying to overcome it, it’s better to increase community membership to achieve critical mass so that 4% and 1% of the community are sufficiently large numbers of people who will share diverse content that is useful to the other 95% who will never post.

21. Leading successful communities requires:

Choosing the topic carefully.Publicizing the community.Increasing membership.Posting and replying to prime the pump.Using appropriate collaboration tools.Hosting periodic events.Providing useful content.Explaining how to participate.Setting goals and measuring progress.Soliciting, collecting, and promoting success stories.Book Number 4: The Five Cs of KM (2022)

22. Many words starting with C are important elements of KM:

The Five Cs: Capture, Curate, Connect, Collaborate, and CreateCommunicate, Collect, Classify, Contribute, CodifyCuriosity, Crowdsourcing, Community, Content, ConversationCulture, Change, Context, Complexity, CynefinCompile, Cultivate, Competence, Capability, Checklist

23. Curation is an important part of knowledge management. Knowledge managers need to curate a wide variety of content to make the most important and useful information easy to find and retrieve. It’s not enough to just collect content and make it available in a large repository. Selecting and highlighting the best of this content greatly simplifies effective reuse. Knowledge managers are usually better at finding and tagging information than others in their organizations. Moreover, they can enable people to get the information they need more easily by curating it for their users. Since most users don’t add tags, and the ones that tag don’t usually do it well, knowledge managers can provide a valuable service by doing this for all contributed content.

24. People generally won’t edit wiki pages. Wikis are often created by a committed individual who hopes that others will share a similar passion for the topic and add to the content. When these others fail to materialize, the wiki ends up being maintained primarily by the original creator and thus is more similar to a blog or a website.

Book Number 5: Knowledge Nuggets: 100 KM Infographics (2023)

25. People love infographics. Rather than spending the time to read any of my 1,000 blog posts, many followers appreciate succinct visual summaries. That is why I posted a weekly KM infographic and published 100 of them in a book.

Book Number 6: Profiles in Knowledge: 120 Thought Leaders in Knowledge Management (2024)

26. There are many great KM practitioners and thought leaders. Some think that doing a good job as KMers means they are thought leaders, but they haven’t published much content. Thought leaders typically have written books, book chapters, and numerous articles published in periodicals. They tend to be frequent bloggers, speakers/workshop presenters at conferences, and presenters on community calls and webinars. They publish articles and make insightful posts on LinkedIn, post and reply in communities such as the SIKM Leaders Community and KM4Dev, and serve as mentors to other KM practitioners. They practice what they preach by taking time to openly share their knowledge with others in the field.

Book Number 7: 12 Steps to KM Success: A Guide to Implementing Knowledge Management (to be published in 2025)

27. Implementing a successful KM program can be done by following these 12 steps:

Learn about the field.Identify 3 objectives.Get leadership commitment.Answer 9 questions on people, process, and technology.Articulate your vision.Define the KM strategy.Define compelling use cases.Define program governance.Specify modes of knowledge flow.Select and implement KM components.Integrate, innovate, and iterate.Share, seek feedback, and pay it forward.

28. Showing the value of KM is best done through making a logical business case and telling success stories demonstrating the benefits. Trying to compute the ROI of a KM program is futile, and those who request this are probably quite skeptical about knowledge management.

29. Knowledge sharing can be motivated using incentives and techniques, but nothing works better than executives leading by example.

Incentives

Performance ratings and salary increasesPromotion requirementTangible rewardsRecognitionCompetitive rankings

Techniques

GamificationDigital badges and designationsPercent completionLeaderboardsScarcity and power of pull

30. for the field. As Etienne Wenger said, “If by manage we mean to care for, grow, steward, make more useful, then the term knowledge management is rather apt.” And KM is not dead. The practitioners, terminology, and technology of knowledge management change over time. But the underlying need to share, innovate, reuse, collaborate, and learn does not go away.

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