This article is an
essay on evolution of knowledge management from the historical perspective to
its present day- 2001 relatively, the year that this essay was published. It
offers insight and means where it may be headed in the future.
Knowledge management is like any system of thought that has value, is
both old and new, and its combination of new ideas with ideas that “everyone
has known all along” should reassure practitioners rather than unnerve them.
Knowledge management is not just a consultants’ invention but a
practitioner-based, substantive response to real social and economic trends.
With the author’s
pragmatic analysis approach on knowledge management he examined it on this
context:
Ø
Globalization –The speeding up of all elements of global
trade—mainly because of information
technology—and the decline of centralized economies have created an almost frenetic atmosphere within firms. ,
“What do we know, who knows it, what do we not know that we should know?”
Ø
Ubiquitous and
computing - the premium value of knowledge that cannot be digitized,
codified, or easily distributed. As
access to information dramatically expands, so that people increasingly have
access to almost all the information they might need at any time and in any
place (and, surprisingly, at low or no cost), the value of the cognitive skills still unreplicable by silicon becomes
greater. Subsequently, knowledge components such as judgment, design,
leadership, better decisions, persuasiveness, wit, innovation, aesthetics, and
humor become more valuable than before.
Ø
Knowledge-centric
view of the firm. Sidney Winter’s
description of firms as “organizations that know how to do things” expresses
the idea most succinctly. 1 The main building block of these capabilities (or unit of
analysis, if you prefer) is knowledge, especially the knowledge that is mostly
tacit and specific to the firm.
The author as a practitioner of knowledge management played a vital role
in his analysis of knowledge management.
In his vivid description of timeline in Boston, 1993 begun the knowledge management conference
attended by 150 people from different organizations/firms/companies. Those speakers at the conference defined
organizational knowledge to differentiate
it from data and information. To those at the conference, knowledge seemed
to be a key residual— what remained
to explain internal productivity after everything else was accounted for. As for the attendees (even if only as a form
of unease) that even “perfectly” managed information would not lead them to the
promised land of greatly improved productivity or innovation as the subject was
so new and untested, that remained theoretical - but “real-time”
knowledge projects to point to.
Looking back at the conference as he cited some companies/organizations
on related knowledge conversation, which have both intellectual and practical
sources that may give a reasonably good picture good picture of where the
practice of knowledge management came from, what its important elements were
then, and still are today.
Coming up to his conclusion, the author had the historical review on the
continual two-way traffic between the worlds of theory and practice.
His insights are on the following context:
Intellectual antecedents
Economics
Philosophy and psychology
Practices
1. Information management
2. The quality movement
3. The human capital approach has a strong
and well- known theoretical base.
The past and the future
Knowledge management seems likely to follow one of two future paths. The
better one is the direction taken by the quality movement. Its key ideas became
so deeply embedded in practices and organizational routines that they became
more-or- less invisible. Practitioners reading this brief history can help keep
knowledge management on the better path by drawing on that legacy for their own
thinking and action, maintaining a tolerance for ambiguity and complexity and a
striving for rigor that define the best of knowledge management.
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