People-focused knowledge management

How Do We Implement Integrative Management?
Integrative management cannot take place unless the enterprise
leadership and the pervasive culture recognize and reward the desired
behavior and resulting performance. Peer recognition and all other
implicit aspects of culture must be supportive. Individual supervisors
and managers will need to take responsibility for looking at their
operations in detail. They need to collaborate constructively and
innovatively with upstream, downstream, and adjacent functions to
decide how tasks and detailed work may be shared or changed. That
requires taking others into their confidence, thinking broader about
the business function beyond amassing personal power, staff, and
responsibilities, and realizing that their personal success is closely tied
to enterprise success, both in general and as a result of the new incen-
tives and environment (Buckman 2004).
Integrative management is not automatically achieved overnight.
Incentives, operations and management practices, and education with
extensive communication must be practiced. That will foster an envi-
ronment — an integrative management culture — of collaboration
and cooperation based on the clear understanding that personal and
enterprise success are intertwined and follow from working together
toward common goals. More than anything else, integrative manage-
ment relies on quality intangible capital — the knowledge and under-
standing of people backed up by facilities such as expert networks,
knowledge-based systems, knowledge bases, and information services.
Informed and competent decision making is of crucial importance
for integrative management. Without knowledge management (i.e.,
systematic and deliberate development, maintenance, renewal, and
maintenance of knowledge and understanding) integrative manage-
ment cannot take place. Decision-Making/Problem-Solving followed
by implemented action consists of matching knowledge assets with
corresponding information assets to make it possible for individuals,
and the enterprise as a whole, to collaborate, understand interactions,
and implement broad, effective actions required for integrative man-
agement. As indicated in Figure 8-5 in a simplified financial industry
example, both appropriately matched knowledge and information
are required. Excellent information about situations is required to
describe conditions appropriately, and excellent knowledge is applied
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