Worker Effectiveness Improvement, not KM
The Internet Time Glossary defines Knowledge Management as "whatever you want it to mean."
David Pollard has posted a wonderful description of how KM ought to work on his blog, How to Save the World.
His views on Knowledge Management echo many of the themes I've talked about here on the Internet Time Blog.
- The measure of success is high performance of the worker. Personal knowledge management -- enablement -- is more important than flowcharts and databases.
- KM should leverage natural processes, not try to change the basic ways things are acomplished.
- Collaboration -- making and maintaining connections -- is more important than trying to capture and store ideas.
- KM must be bottom-up, not top-down. The holistic systems viewpoint, e.g. Nonaka's model, means nothing to the individual in the trenches.
Dave comes up with these bottom-up processes:
That covers just about everything a knowledge worker is challenged to do. Do what you can to improve these dozen processes and forget the top-down stuff.
My thinking is so conceptual that I sometimes see patterns where none exist, but Dave's approach seems like yet another illustration of this:
It is so difficult to free our minds to recongize that context trumps content. There's life outside of classrooms, books, and databases.
Posted by Jay Cross at June 4, 2004 03:06 PM | TrackBack
