Actual Perception is Theoretical Reality, or How Knowledge Management Kills Knowledge Management

After a couple weeks off, spent observing knowledge in other areas of the country, I return today with a thought.  Knowledge Management is definitely more than the tools used, but in the converse, it is also more than the knowledge managed.  The whole, in this case, carries value far beyond the sum of its parts.  An interesting concept to be sure, but somewhat difficult to explain.  Here is an attempt...

I have spent several hours in the last couple of months battling issues on the users' end with a software that we have rolled out in thin-client mode only [thin-client computing means that all installed software necessary to perform the software's functions doesn't reside on the user's computer, but on a server elsewhere, with the user's computer using a web browser to connect to and run the software on the server - it takes up less space on the user's computer, and has the benefit of making maintenance and other tasks easier and more efficient to do].  The interesting thing is that the ease and efficiency gained from our efforts is far less easy and efficient given competing knowledge management efforts.

A lot of the fight has been waged against potential problems that only appear on certain users' machines, and the root of the vast majority of those problems is Google's toolbar.  I am not a hater of Google - I do find their lack of competence in efficient computing and resulting spread of JAAWS mania (Just Add Another Windows Server - I coined that a while ago) to be disappointing, but I don't 'hate' Google - but their efforts in the knowledge management arena have hindered knowledge management in the systems with which I work.  The coding of the toolbar changes the functionality of the browser's behavior with respect to opening new pages, pop-up blocking and the like.  Those 'assets' interfere with the functionality of the software, which relies on dynamically building web pages for presentation to the user.

Why is it Google who receives my blame for this?  There is of course the most obvious primacy of position - my system is a production system, installed before Google toolbar was even promoted and entered into the Web, and so it should have spent more time in the stages of researching conflicts and making sure that it didn't interfere with vital software already on the host machine - but that is only a logical argument.  The reason for the blame lies in the manner through which the toolbar is distributed.

When Google toolbar is installed, the user is not asked about individual options, or given the information they need to be able to make an informed decision.  They are asked if they want to install the toolbar to protect them from evil things and help them find things they want.  If anything, it is the outgrowth of a wave of frustration and disappointment with the toolbar and other software offered natively by Microsoft.  From what I have heard, it is something that users like to use, which is a good thing for Google, since that is a primary requirement for an add-in to aid the user.  

There could be nothing easier than asking the user if they want to install something, and they just click 'Yes'.  The problem is that old nemesis the Law of Unintended Consequences.  We have long ago gone to the presence of medical testing ethics boards who must approve of medical testing, for example, and even if you are not doing anything that could cause long-term harm to an individual, you must have both the permission of the board, as well as the permission and full disclosure to the test participants, before the process begins.  This was done because of the Law of Unintended Consequences when the medical testing done in the post WWII era resulted in horrific side effects and innocent victims of the testing wound up harmed for life, or even killed as the result of the experiments.  The resulting outcry of society and resulting pressure on created the safeguarded system we have for medical testing today.  Can any of us truthfully say that the resulting discoveries from radiation testing on soldiers, thalidomide testing - even Josef Mengele's work - are justification for the ways in which the knowledge was gained?

You might say that comparing medical testing to testing and installation of software to be a reach, and if we weren't in the information age, where data and the decisions from it/harms done by it do have a lasting and indelible impression on the consumers and users, that would be the case.  In the past, the lifeblood of the post-capitalistic society was the value of human life as expressed by therbligs and other manpower measures of what a person could do with their physically hale body, and so things that would unwittingly tamper with that and the future life lived well were found to be taboo.  Fast forward to today, where we still measure productivity but in terms of data and information, rather than iron out the door, and you start to see the connection - anything that harms our ability to do more work, efficiently, is by definition the opposite of what we need to have.

The best-case scenario here would be for the developers of things like the Google toolbar to take a version of the Hippocratic oath that all doctors have to take, pledging that they will do no harm, and having a malpractice system that handles times when they don't (there is the gasoline for the fire).  Barring that, a proper installation process for the users would be one that takes them through a few options and tells them the possible consequences of what they do before installing.  As an example, when installing, warning the user that if they use any software that the first open a web page to use, they may begin to have problems using that software as the result of installing the toolbar.  That would definitely have a chilling effect on the rapid adoption of things, but it would 1) improve the quality of the coding, so that fewer interferences would be had, 2) enforce codes more rigidly so that 'improvements' don't lead to bare metal re-installs (to be fair here, it wasn't Google toolbar that caused the bare metal work, it was a calendar and shareware, but the concept remains the same) and 3) cause more people to be cognizant of what they are doing.

KM is a desirable practice, especially since knowledge is the new steel, in terms of our raw materials.  Tools that leverage KM are welcomed, because we don't have to carry the bit bucket ourselves.  It is at the locus of usability and benign effects where we find the true value in our KM systems.  There is far too much work to be accomplished to have to re-do everything we have done before because someone else has started to do something related, yet incompatible.  As inconvenient as it would be to have a user do more than click on 'Install', I can vouch for the fact that causing them not to be able to see the things they need to do their job is worse.