Dave Pollard’s paper, « the future of knowledge management » addresses the need to reinvent knowledge management after the failure of big K programs to deliver on their promises. Dave discards the old corporate-centric idea of KM, focused on ‘capturing best practices, success stories and lessons learned’, which has resulted in repeated failure, and advocates a new people-centric focus for KM, which should be about ‘improving personal productivity and effectiveness of front-line workers’ (Drucker).
Though this paper is full of excellent ideas, especially the implications of this new focus on the KM practice of large organizations, I have to disagree with this either/or thesis, which swings the pendulum too far in the opposite direction.
Indeed, KM has failed when it has focused too much on explicit and codified knowledge - the needs of the organization - at the expense of tacit knowledge and social connections - the needs of the front-line people. But a new approach that would focus on the needs of the people and forget about those of the organization would be doomed as well, for lack of support and lack of structure.
Beckhard : « Enterprise managers today are deeply concerned with the dilemma of how to (a) fully mobilize the energy of the organization’s human resources towards achievement of the organization’s performance objectives, and (b) at the same time, so organize the work, work environment, the communications system, and the relationships of people, that individuals need for self worth, growth, and satisfaction are sigificantly met at work. To resolve this dilemma in our rapidly changing environment, new organization forms must be developed ; more effective goal setting and planning processes must be learned, and practice teams of interdependent people must spend real time improving their methods of working, decision-making and communicating. Competing or conflicting groups must move toward a collborativ wy of work. In order for these changes to occur and to be maintained, a planned, managed change effort is necessary – a program of organisation development. »
KM is about leveraging the knowledge of others AND about capitalizing experiences, constructing new knowledge and make it available to all. Successful KM programs manage to take into consideration both the needs of the individuals and those of the formal organization, recognizing that they differ but complement each other. Front-line individuals must see the immediate operational benefit for them, which usually builds on tacit knowledge and problem solving, and organizations must see the longer term enculturation benefit, which usually builds on explicit knowledge and categorizing.
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