Stephen Wehrenberg wrote:
> Is it just me, or is anyone else in our community concerned about trends
> in the "field" of knowledge management? It looks like we are about to put
> "the folks who brought you reengineering" in charge of the discipline of
> KM. Remember reengineering? Where we burned our human capital to make
> streamlined work processes? The same folks who tell you to reboot because
> they can't figure out what's wrong, and then can't tell you why rebooting
> works?
That all depends on which brand of knowledge management you're talking
about. If it's the reductionist brand, you're quite right. Knowledge
management to that school of thought is just the latest form of top-down,
prescriptive thinking in the minds of hierarchical authoritarian
management types. If, on the other hand, you're talking about the new
brand of knowledge management as inspired by complex adaptive systems
theory, you couldn't be further from the truth. I would encourage you,
and others, to familiarize yourself with a somewhat more enlightened view
of the subject as promoted by the Knowledge Management Consortium
(www.km.org). There you will find a vision of knowledge management that
sees learning organizations and organizational behavior as a function of
emergent knowledge, not engineering. Instead of focusing on knowledge,
per se, as the equivalent of objects that can somehow be managed, the
Knowledge Management Consortium, instead, suggests that what we should be
focusing on is the management of natural knowledge processes! Manage how
knowledge naturally unfolds in an organization, and innovation and
creatively adaptive behavior will follow.
--"Mark W. McElroy" <mmcelroy@vermontel.com>
Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>