Steve -
I very much appreciate your cogent, well-reasoned defense of an
'accumulation' model (in the context of a larger model incorporating
generation and circulation of knowledge).
Some problematic issues for me.
One is the notion that 'knowledge' can be stored. I would say
knowledge-in-use is constructed, on-the-fly, as it were, from data and
information by individuals and groups. This is a semantic and
philosophical* issue, although it has implications for the next issue.
The other issue is more critical to practical KM. I agree in principle
that without memory, there's no learning or intelligence. But
'organizational memory' is very different from human memory. People can
instantly recall and associate disparate elements with no conscious
'look-up'activity. We brainstorm at ease, and unrelated facts and
impressions marshall themselves, unbidden, into previously unimagined
relationships. New ideas come to us.
With KM systems this doesn't happen. The function of 'corporate memory' is
more deliberate. We must perform a search to obtain data, and we find what
we look for. This is unlike the operation of our brains, which have
mysterious associative functions drawing on all five senses and beyond.
One important goal -- though not the only one -- of knowledge use in
organizations is to leverage the unexpected. The examples we often hear
(learning from unlikely scenarios, discovery of unusual properties of
substances, putting two things together to create something new and
marketable) emphasize serendipity, experiment, brainstorming. They often
result from accidental collisions of information which hadn't been put
together before.
Creative people do this on their own. Creative organizations accomplish
this through conversation.
I have 'selected out' an aspect of knowledge leverage -- the creation of
new value -- and made a judgement that it constitutes the crux of creation
of new value from knowledge. This personal opinion does not invalidate
your generation / circulation / storage & management model. I like it. But
I do have a question.
How do you optimize an organizational KM system to enable 'creative
collisions,' or, in other words, conversation that results in new value?
*Note: "Semantic and philosophical," meaning it goes back to the
'participative' vs 'possessive' definition of knowledge, which we don't
need to rehash!
Neil Olonoff
Conversant Associates
Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com>
Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>