Peter Schutt from IBM speaks about “post-Nonaka knowledge management”. He discusses scientific management based on Taylor’s approach to people, proposes that current business theories (e.g. TQM, BPR) are building upon Taylor too and then suggests that we are at the turning point now, because scientific management can not be applied to knowledge work.
He states that KM is not about managing knowledge. It’s about managing knowledge work and about productivity of knowledge workers. (This reminds me things that Jim McGee is writing all the time).
He talks about stages in KM history and gives a couple of great citations:
since knowledge is intangible, boundaries, and dynamic and cannot be stocked it has to be exploited where and when it is needed to create values (Nonaka, 2001, “The emergence of “Ba”)
You cannot manage knowledge like you cannot manage love, patriotism or your children. But you can set up and environment where knowledge evolves (Larry Prusak)
The rest of the presentation is focused on three things that are important if you would like to create an environment to support knowledge workers: organisation&culture, processes, information technology. The slides contain interesting frameworks to think about, but too complex to write in a blog. Just a couple of notes:
Organisational knowledge is 4% structured, 16% unstructured and 80% experiences and expertise of people, but 80% of IT budget spent on managing that 4% (refers to analysts from somewhere)
Use of baseball and soccer metaphors to compare old style culture and KM supportive culture.
See also The post-Nonaka Knowledge Management article by Peter Schütt
Tags: I-KNOWArchived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/07/03.html#a655; comments are here.
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