IT and Knowledge Management – Some Examples

There is no such thing as KM software!!!

Well, that’s commonplace. As a number of authors have stated, TIC can be used as a KM enabler rather than a KM system. However, very few of those authors give examples.

In this post I’ll list three roles TIC can play within knowledge management. Keep following this blog and you’ll see more down the road.

1 – Through virtual environments, bringing people working remotely, enabling virtual practice communities.

2 – Workflow systems could be provided with listeners which are able to CAPTURE knowledge intensive activities.

3 – Wikis or content managers can be used to structure, categorize, tag, compare and contextualize the captured data, so that it changes data into information.

Again, a KM strategy cannot rely only on IT to be carried out, but  a good technology solution will be more effective when it can position itself as a KM enabler and not a miraculous “knowledge manager”.

What Is Knowledge Management?

Every text on the web about knowledge management ends up posting its definition.

Why shouldn’t this blog go ahead and try to do that as well?

I could start by saying that knowledge management is a group of knowledge related business processes and one could classify “knowledge processes” as all the existing, or in design, corporate processes which are related to activities such as the learning, acquiring/reusing of information, skill/competence metrics and so on.

Does that mean any company which has a few knowledge related processes can say it performs knowledge management? Well, anyone is free to say anything, but it would not be necessarily true.  For knowledge management to be in place the company should be conscious about the intensity of knowledge in each process and how to apply intentional strategies to it.

Knowledge is always there, but what will set modern and knowledge oriented organizations apart from the classical ones is how conscious they are about it and how effective the intentional strategies applied to the knowledge related processes are.

First Post: Unknowledge

 

Discussing ideas, sharing thoughts and examining trends on knowledge management.

This is what this blog is meant for.

However, rather than “knowledge”, right in this first post, I’d like to talk about “unkowledge”!!!

What do I mean by that??

Well, I’d define “unknowledge” as “the result of an unlearning process”.

From that perspective, within the modern and, therefore, changing organization, the ability to discharge one’s mind of out-of-date practices should be considered as important as the ability to learning new ones.

Old concepts, already accommodated in peoples’ minds can hold them back and prevent them from reaching a learning goal or adapting themselves to a new organizational environment or philosophy. Besides, I shall finally argue that there is no innovation without “unlearning”.

Would you agree with that?

Does your company know how to “unlearn”?

Do you think formal corporate education could be a way to achieve “unlearning”?

Think about that and make sure you’ve achieved enough “unkowledge” before moving to further changing goals!