Jonathan Gordon-Till - Global Knowledge Management Lead of R&D at Mondelēz International

So Jonathan, if you've listened to the podcast before, I always like to lead off with the simple question of how do you define knowledge management? It's harder than it sounds, right?

It's one of those impossible questions, isn't it? And there are as many answers as there are people doing knowledge management.

So I guess for me, the kind of dictionary definition, just the short form would be, it's about the process of creating and sharing and using knowledge, sometimes information within an organization, but to improve efficiency and decision-making.

So it's got to have that element in it.

And I do love the, there's a definition in ISO 30401, one of the initial clauses there, the whole thing is littered with good definitions, but this one clause, really resonates with me when we're talking about what exactly sums up knowledge management.

And it says, I'll just read it.

It says, organizations can no longer rely on the spontaneous diffusion of knowledge to keep up with the pace of change.

Instead, knowledge must be deliberately created, consolidated, applied, and reused faster than the rate of change.

And that, to me, is what we are doing in knowledge management.

That is kind of knowledge management in a nutshell.

And if we're not able to do some or all of those things and keep ahead of the pace of change, then I think it's not knowledge management, it's something else.

It's an incredibly big challenge though.

I mean, especially now in the age of AI and gosh, we'll get to that, but the rate of change is spectacular.

I mean, organizations are transforming.

Things that used to take years to do or are being done in weeks or less.

And so it is a pretty tall order to say that KM should be the driver for keeping pace with the rate of change.

You've been doing this for a while.

How do you go about making sure that you answer that mail?

It is a really tough order.

And, you know, when I started in this KM space, it wasn't called KM back in the day.

I mean, I came from the library and information space and I was doing KM But it was very, very different than what we have today.

We didn't have so many of the technologies.

We didn't have the kind of holistic view of what KM comprises, the people, technology, process, and content, and culture, and all of that.

It was just something that we called KM.

Now we're in a very different world.