I looked at the site where Nick has posted his KM/IC survey. It again
raises the question regarding time and the half life of knowledge.
One of the major concerns that has been raised, most recently with the Dow
aproaching the 10K mark (hmmm, sounds like a race doesn't it?) is the
obsession over short term vs long term gains. Nick's survey only captures
one end of the spectrum.
This comes at a time when many corporations, at least here in the US, are
starting to look at "green" issues- the environment and longer term
sustainability while simultaneously confronting an increasing interest on
virtual teams, organizations, and activities.
What is the cost of all this KM activity? What is the half-life of what
has been captured? Is KM/IC like decreasing term life insurance? The cost
per bit of storage is going down but the cost/useful bit of information is
going up
Somewhere time has to be factored into the equation as an indogenous
variable. In a publicly traded company KM/IC seems to have importance to
the investor relations department and a certain segment of the managerial
finance, accounting and legal arenas who have one pulse to which they
march. Marketing and competitive intellegence has another clock ticking,
as does manufacturing, as does reseach, as does....
It would seem that one of the issues facing a learning organization is
that we have a genetically engineered organism. One brontosaurous had two
brains (we'll not touch this one...grin...)but the current corporation
seems to have multiple hearts beating at their own rhythms which sometimes
come into resonance and at other times are completely chaotics.
It seems that this temporal dissonance has been dealt with using standard
equilibrium models, such as PERT charts and related project flow
methodologies.
KM/IC seems to ask the hard questions
thoughts?
tom abeles
--tom abeles <tabeles@tmn.com>
Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>