Replying to LO30545 --
Knowledge Management is a term which many of its advocates believe to
be a huge oxymoron, so I would always suggest that any two people
meeting to discuss KM ask each other to define their common space
before conversing across each other
Personally, I like to see KM as a continuation of the Drucker school of
thinking (his term from the 1970s knowledge worker) aimed at designing
organisations around people as primary source of productivity. Whilst
this might seem an obvious assumption, you need to know that every
organisation is currently accounted for (and thus time-managed and
conflict-producing) on exactly the opposite assumption of : machines
are investments in productivity and people are costs
This is why KM appears to me to be a call for a total change in system
toward living/learning systems rather than ones where people are the
least valued links. This goes to today's fundamental debates on
transparency which can only be achieved by shared governance
implementing a whole new system of relationship metrics - what KM often
calls with intangibles valuation or Intellectual Capital's connections
with human and social capital. All of this maths exists, see eg
http://www.knowledgeboard.com/community/zones/sig/kmei.html
but you will not find accountants introducing something that would be
the end of their monopoly to rule over people
chris macrae, wcbn007@easynet.co.uk ,
http://www.beyond-branding.com/blog/blogger.html
PS Writing today (9/11) I would like to mention that these views
(whether you call them KM or something else) come to the greatest
double whammy we confront on the world's sustainability. I'm involved
in presentations (openly sourcable by anyone) around this issue every
day next week but the double whammy to set your eyes on and decide
whether you wish to join in and confront revolves round this pair of
contradictions:
1) Experts in Risk, Sustainability, Reconciliation & Responsibility all
agree: World's biggest conflicts cannot be resolved by isolated
organisations. Collaboration is needed or the world's biggest divides
will compound terrifyingly...
2) The amount of time and measurements which management spends governing
separability dwarfs that on connectivity, even though corporate
reputations and most value productivity is now intangible and networked
(ie multiplied through connectivity)
Oddly, economics and society have never been so intimately bound
together in each other's opportunities & threats. Almost every large
corporate failure of recent years, didn't need to have happened if
transparency auditing was viewed today in America to be the benchmarking
challenge that Baldrige was for tangible quality systems in the 1980s.
Given that systems only ever spin virtuously or viciously, the
collaboration question the world asks: is will America - and its
defining role in globalization - 'get it' in time?
--"chris macrae" <wcbn007@easynet.co.uk>
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