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The resulting culture reflects positive practical experiences with
KM, and with marketplace and societal pressures to increase
the focus on IC assets for competitive reasons and the greater
understanding and capabilities of KM approaches and
technologies.
2. Science and technology developments make it possible to
provide
supply push to create new solutions built on solid, rel-
evant, and practical understandings of underlying mechanisms.
Globalization has placed businesses
everywhere in new and dif-
ferent competitive situations where knowledgeable, effective behav-
ior provides the competitive edge. Enterprises are turning to explicit
and systematic KM to develop the intellectual capital needed to
succeed. Further developments provide benefits resulting from
changes in the workplace and in management and operational prac-
tices. Changes will come partly from information technology and
artificial intelligence developments. However, more important
changes are expected in people-focused practices to build, apply, and
deploy knowledge and understanding for the support of innovative
and effective knowledge-intensive work.
Much remains to be done. Our understanding
of knowledge and
how people use it to work has a long way to go. We need a theory
of knowledge and perhaps a new theory of the firm to create a solid
foundation for future KM. Still, users can expect significant benefits
from KM as it develops over the next decades.
Knowledge-Focused Mentality and
Corporate Culture
What’s required is new accounting, a new measurement system which
should be instituted internally within organizations. And we need a
change in mentality.
Baruch Lev in
Business Week, June 18, 2001, p. 30 D
No matter how intelligent a leader’s strategy for change, it will fail
without the dedicated support of the rank and file. Winning that
support often requires more effort than devising the strategy itself.
Carol Hymowitz, “In
the Lead,”
Wall Street Journal,
April 24, 2002
NGKM practitioners develop widely shared mindsets across their
organizations. The typical mindset focuses on three aspects:
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1. The psychological, social, organizational, economic, and tech-
nical mechanisms that make knowledge and other IC assets
strengthen operational and strategic situation-handling and the
effectiveness of resulting actions.
2. The management of knowledge and IC assets from operational
performance and investment points of view to support the
enterprise and its stakeholders (including
the employees
themselves).
3. The equitable balance between dilemmas, such as long-term
versus short-term goals, work-life versus personal well-being,
“use what we have” versus invest to improve, and so on.
The mindset embraces proactive, exploratory, and innovative per-
spectives with the notions of the careful and responsible management
of knowledge and IC assets. The mindset amounts to a benevolent
knowledge and intellectual capital stewardship mentality (NGKM),
which brings constructive and actionable
knowledge perspectives to
everyday situations, automatically and naturally. Building the men-
tality is achieved by helping people develop in several ways. They
need to develop an understanding of options for developing, obtain-
ing, and leveraging knowledge assets for everyday work; they need
to be provided with role models; they need to be motivated; they need
to understand the advantages for themselves,
their customers and
stakeholders, and the enterprise.
In organizations that pursue NGKM, the new mentality becomes
a natural part of the daily “living the job,” resulting in automatized
operational considerations for how to acquire and apply the best pos-
sible expertise by collaborating, discussing with experts and peers,
hiring, accessing knowledge bases, using computer models, and in
numerous other ways. From strategic perspectives,
NGKM makes
people consider options and tradeoffs for how to invest time, effort,
and resources to build knowledge and IC assets for future needs.
A new awareness for NGKM is emerging among KM practition-
ers and theoreticians.
Benevolent knowledge and IC stewardship involve gentle and
flexible top-down monitoring, visioning, and coordination,
while avoiding regimentation and bureaucratization.
The NGKM scope is broadened beyond operational considera-
tions. It is colinear with enterprise (company, city, region,
country) objectives, strategy, direction, and purpose.
NGKM is in harmony with the culture
and joint values of the
enterprise and stakeholders.
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NGKM focuses on long-term viability, constrained by the need
to secure short-term survival.
NGKM builds knowledge and IC capabilities and assets for the
future while utilizing existing ones for present effectiveness.
NGKM efforts are self-sustaining and self-renewing. The IC
leveraging mentality becomes an automatic and integral part of
“living the job.”
NGKM is people-focused (not technology-centric), recognizing
fundamental knowledge mechanisms.
Modern IT is vital, designed primarily for simple automation
and KM infrastructure, but later for
intelligent applications to
offload mental tasks from knowledge workers.
The many isolated variations of KM thrusts such as knowledge
sharing, storytelling, communities of practice, knowledge har-
vesting, and IT-based KM “systems,” need to be conceptualized
into a systematic whole for NGKM.
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