Time For KM To Manage Knowledge About Management?

Steve Denning, RETHINK - Forbes, Mar. 18 2011

EXTRACT:
The bottom line of these discussions is that the horizontal, collaborative, value-adding principles of knowledge management are barely compatible with the top-down, bureaucratic, efficiency driven preoccupations of traditional management. Even KM programs that by all measures are doing well and enjoy significant top-management support are still at risk. In any efficiency or cost-cutting drive, knowledge management will usually be seen as “a low hanging fruit.”

The practical options for a knowledge manager in the light of this are as follows:

* Wear a parachute at all times. One never knows who will wield the axe or when it might fall.
* Educate yourself about the nature of traditional management and realize that there is a fundamental difference in values.
* Make sure that your knowledge management operation meets all the metrics and responds to the efficiency concerns of traditional management.
* Learn about how some organizations are managing themselves in a radically different way that is compatible with knowledge, as discussed in, The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management: Reinventing the Workplace for the 21st Century as well as other books such as The Power of Pull by John Hagel, John Seely Brown and Lang Davison, or Reorganize for Resilience by Ranjay Gulati, or The New Capitalist Manifesto by Umair Haque, or Leadership in a Wiki World by Rod Collins.
* Join together with allies both inside your organization and outside. You may well find that there are groups already practicing radical management within your organization in software development (under titles like “Agile”, “Scrum”, “Kanban”) or in manufacturing (under the title of “Lean”).
* Spread knowledge about radical management within your organization. We now have reliable knowledge that traditional management is leading to disastrous long-term business result. The extraordinary financial gains that come from making the shift to radical management (e.g. ten times increments in share price over ten years) will far outweigh the gains from any other knowledge that KM can disseminate. ... continue reading

Knowledge Management in a Changing World - Best Practices Revisited

Just found an excellent article on "Knowledge Management in a Changing World," by Steven A. Lastres, Director of Library and Knowledge Management at Debevoise & Plimpton LLP. West Librarian Relations - Law Librarians newsletter - March/April 2009–Law Books and Legal Information–West:, Also linked at Future Ready 365 and India librarian international

Contents of the article include issues, such as, Knowledge Management in Action, Becoming Business Managers, and Other considerations in selecting and deploying KM services.

Extract:

Since the earliest days of libraries, librarians have served as knowledge managers. Whether they were maintaining the scrolls at the Library of Alexandria, creating the catalog for the House of Wisdom (a Ninth Century Islamic library), or assembling annotated links for the law firm intranet, law librarians have always been in the forefront of organizing information and adding value to it. Librarians have long excelled at getting information into the hands of the people who need it. The precise definition of knowledge management (KM) is an elusive one, but one pillar of KM practice holds that knowledge management "is the process through which organizations generate value from their intellectual and knowledge-based assets."(1)...

Other considerations in selecting and deploying KM services include the following:

•Access needs to be intuitive–no training should be required. A well-developed taxonomy that makes sense to the legal staff is key. Content ought to be logically organized. The process is a laborious one for the KM staff, but it pays off in time saved by attorneys;
•It also pays to train attorneys how to get the most out of the services KM makes available. Getting the best value out of subscription services is a two-step process, in which the KM manager (1) makes sure the legal staff knows what is available and (2) makes sure that staff know the ins and outs of searching those services. continue reading

(1) Megan Santosus & Jon Surmacz, The ABCs of Knowledge Management, CIO Magazine, 2001.

Personal Knowledge Management, Edited by David Pauleen and Gary Gorman (2011) - A new book

Personal Knowledge Management: Individual, Organizational and Social Perspectives, Edited by David Pauleen and Gary Gorman. Gower Pub Co (2011) 276 pages, ISBN: 9780566088926
About the book:
By delving both deeply and broadly into its subject, the distinguished authors help all those concerned with 'knowledge work' and 'knowledge workers' to see how PKM supports and affects individuals, organizations and society as a whole; to better understand the concepts involved and to benefit from relevant research in this important area.

Table of Contents:

Preface;
The nature and value of personal knowledge management, G.E. Gorman and David J. Pauleen;

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? A stoical perspective on personal knowledge management, Peter Case and Jonathan Gosling;

From information to imagination: multivalent logic and system creation in personal knowledge management, Peter Murphy;

Recovering the individual as the locus of knowledge: communication and PKM, Mark Wolfe;

Systems intelligence as a lens for managing personal knowledge, Rachel Jones, James Corner and Raimo P. Hamalainen;

Managing your own knowledge: a personal perspective, Larry Prusak and Jocelyn Cranefield;

KM and the individual: it's nothing personal, David Snowden, David Pauleen and Sally Jansen van Vuuren;

Managing personal connectivity: finding flow for regenerative knowledge creation, Darl G. Kolb and Paul Collins;

No knowledge but through information, William Jones;

Personal knowledge management and knowledge worker capabilities, Thomas H. Davenport;

Exploring the linkages between personal knowledge management and organizational learning, Ricky K.F. Cheong and Eric Tsui;

The importance of personal knowledge management in the knowledge society, Karl M. Wiig;