知識管理的未來

Jay Cross推薦Dave Pollard寫的The future of KM

他談到過去十年KM由紅極一時,到退居為少數人的困身之地

主因是想創造新的知識管理文化,卻未能順應企業內現有的管理文化

他的觀點給我很大的提醒

他認為KM人員應做如下調整

they require management and KM leaders to understand and accommodate front-line knowledge behaviors instead of trying to change them. Here are a few of those answers:

• Change the job of knowledge professionals—assign your researchers, analysts, librarians, database managers, and knowledge trainers to go out and meet one-on-one with front-line practitioners, listen to and observe their "knowledge work,” and provide individualized coaching to show them, in the context of their particular job, how to more effectively organize the information on their hard drive, how to do research, how to find stuff. Teach ’em how to fish instead of catching fish for them.
  
• Except for the prescriptive stuff (policies, regulations, directories, and SOPs), quit collecting stuff centrally, quit browbeating people to contribute knowledge, and redesign the knowledge architecture to accommodate the private stocks, the knowledge that people really value. Respect the concerns about the confidentiality of this knowledge—they’re more likely to reflect concerns that misuse could hurt the company than concerns that shared knowledge is lost power or lost authority. You’ll probably find a lot more of these private stocks than you thought existed, and your respect will surface them and allow you, as a knowledge professional, to do what you do best: helping to better organize and communicate knowledge that’s valuable and available.
  
• Help people connect to experts inside and outside the organization. Focus on capturing the organization’s (and the world’s) know-who instead of the know-how and know-what. That’s a difficult task that will require ingenuity, because you’re going to need to find ways to "automatically” identify those experts and obtain (and keep current) their contact information. Trying to coerce people to post and keep their personal competency and contact information current is, in most companies, an impossible task. Find a way to "harvest” that information instead.

Accommodate reintermediation. People delegate when it makes sense, and rather than trying to stop it, acknowledge that knowledge gathering is a skill, that it has a value, and that it has a cost. Identify and help train the delegates, instead of (or at least before) trying to train the delegators to do it themselves.