Like pretty much any office with more than 3 people, we struggle with the ephemeral concept of knowledge management. Now, this takes the guise of everything from cultural lore to more basic issues like where is the latest version of the FooBaz document but the moral of the story is simple: we’re still trying to find the right approach. We have a corporate product that hardly anyone uses because it’s slow, the search is horrid, and it has very rigid ideas around who can post what where.
Recently, a number of teams have started to use a different product, one they are finding to be far more useful then the corporate standard. Though it isn’t officially supported, it’s gaining quite a bit of traction throughout the organization. Imagine my surprise when an IS wide email goes out saying, in essence, that everyone should STOP using the product that’s working and contact the head of the crappy product team immediately so they can “migrate you over” to the “standard.” In other words, cease doing the thing that’s working, not “wow, we’ll fast track the adoption of this new tool since it’s serving such a vital need.” Makes perfect sense.
As I was reading the email, I thought of St. John’s (Go Johnnies!). Anyway, around the time my father was in school, they built the tundra dorms - named as such for the large open space between the bulk of campus and the dorms. Anyway, when they built the tundra dorms, they didn’t put in sidewalks right away, they waited until the students had worn paths and just paved those. Rather then guess what route residents would take, they let the property emerge. Needless to say, this approach worked pretty darn well.
The parallel here is pretty obvious - right or wrong, the “students” are wearing a path towards this new tool. Now I’m sure we can argue that the corporate standard can do “everything the new tool can do and so much more”, but the crowd has spoken. Instead of using scare tactics to keep people from using it, perhaps the bureaucracy would be better served by following the herd.
