Friday, March 16, 2007

Time to Confess! - Part 2 of 3

Link to Part 1

WK: Information is transformed into knowledge through the following four activities or methods of processing – comparison, consequences, connections and conversations.

Me: If you do this on your blogs, then you’re creating knowledge out of information. Comparison and consequences perhaps help in decision-making. Connections and conversations would help in innovation.

WK: “Knowledge can be likened to a living system, growing and changing as it interacts with the environment.”

Me: Perhaps the single-most important reason why KM is difficult and sounds like an oxymoron.

WK: Intuition is not mystical. It means we have learned the concepts “so thoroughly that they happen automatically, without conscious thought and therefore at great speed.” TD and LP refer to this as “compressed expertise”.

Me: That’s also Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink for you – the power of thinking without thinking! When knowledge reaches this level or rather people reach this level of thinking, Knowledge Management is a very challenging task because codification and articulation cannot be targeted.

WK: “Values and beliefs are integral to knowledge, determining in large part what the knower sees, absorbs, and concludes from his observations”

Me: This may have an implication that KMers will not be comfortable with at all. Knowledge transfer, then, may largely depend on the compatibility of the values and beliefs system of people. Only people with similar such systems will be able to see, absorb and conclude in similar manners. Else, it will be a challenging task for people tuned into different frequencies to learn together.

WK: They quote British Petroleum’s KM initiative as an example where the money that was spent on training and coaching was half of the budget for the pilot (virtual teamwork) concerned.

Me: Hope every organization that has ventured into KM learns from BP.

WK: Shared knowledge means innovation and productivity.

Me: Yup. Provided we all go around with open minds and hearts. :)

WK: “Social, economic and political realities must be fully taken into account to understand the markets for knowledge”

Me: Reason why KMers need to develop social, measurement and political skills.

WK: “Reciprocity, repute and altruism” are pointed out as the three “kinds of payment that exist in the knowledge market”

Me: Efforts to motivate your workforce thus needs to take these three needs into consideration. Reciprocity is a difficult thing because it needs an organization that is on the same plane. Repute is something that KMers and the management need to ensure. Altruism needs very little external motivation as long as there are no negative implications of sharing.

WK: “Knowledge altruism” exists and is real in “organizations that hire nice people and treat them nicely”. :)

Me: Recruitment practices are critical for organizations that are serious about KM.

WK: The three factors that “often cause knowledge markets to operate inefficiently in organizations: the incompleteness of information about the knowledge market, the asymmetry of knowledge and the localness of knowledge”

“High search cost for optimal knowledge is probably the biggest constraint to a completely efficient knowledge market within a firm, especially in large organizations”

Me: I’ve pondered over this and arrived at a blog-based single-window KM system that has the potential to eliminate this problem to a significant extent.

To be continued….(Last and final - Part 3)

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