All in knowledge management
Following my note about Joining Dots' article on "Why is KM so difficult," I tracked down an article of the same title by Julian Birkinshaw from the London Business School. He says, "The problem with knowledge management is that most companies struggle to make it work." And then he gives some suggestions on how to make it work.
Malcolm Ryder has written a thoughtful piece on "Just what's so manageable about Knowledge Management?"
Jon Husband follows the process thread from Ross Mayfield with a nice piece on where he has seen "process" ebb and flow within business. And on top of that, he mentions me as one of two dozen people who have been critical to his understanding in this arena.
Sharon Richardson of Joining Dots writes "Why is KM so difficult?" And she lists her top five reasons that all make sense to me.
Dave Pollard has been thinking about personal knowledge management for a while. "Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) -- an Update" is a nice summary of where his thinking has come from and where he stands today.
An article in CACM highlights how an expert locator is used at a software firm, highlighting some expected and some surprising uses.
Bill Brantly has been thinking about how KM, TOC and Strategy are all related. Now he is proposing a mash-up of all these in "Knowledge Management, Theory of Constraints, and Strategy."
Ross Mayfield kicked off a winding discussion with "The End of Process" in which he complains that "process" is over-used. Many others have contributed to the discussion, in case you haven't seen it.
My friend Stefan Lafloer is suggesting that we work on the knowledge management entry at Wikipedia together. Sounds like a good idea to me.
This isn't a full report on knowledge management at Cervelo, but a reference from Cycle Sport on how they use some intelligence when working with professional cyclists.
Here are some entertaining comments about knowledge management from today's feeds from Euan Semple and David Weinberger.
An excellent Jay Cross and George Siemens audio discussion at Ed Tech Talk was published yesterday (3 Nov 2005). The topics included connectivism, informal learning, objectivity vs. subjectivity, corporate and higher education.
Conventional wisdom is a good guideline, but be sure it makes sense in your circumstances. Inspired by Andy Moore's piece in KMWorld's October supplement on Best Practices in Collaborative Knowledge Sharing.
George at elearnspace is "starting to view effective KM and information management processes as being primarily learning processes." Interesting thought.
Knowledge management and organizational development can work together to grow an organization.
Accsys Corporation has created a KM Market Map. This provides one perspective on KM. There are many.
A piece from the ASU WP Carey School of Business states that to "'Know Thyself' is the First Step to Successful Knowledge Management." I particularly like their effort at defining characteristics of organizations which are more likely to succeed in knowledge management.
Reference: Joining Dots has a good entry on the familiar question of "what is knowledge." JD has adds "cleverness" to the mixture of data, information, knowledge and wisdom.