Art Murray (CEO of Applied Knowledge Sciences; fellow at GWU's Institute for KM) has an interesting piece in the April 2007 KM World on Breaking free of old mindsets.
Making the transformation to an Enterprise of the Future can seem overwhelming. Increased complexity, faster decision cycles and the need for constant innovation, brought about by unrelenting global competition, are just some of the many challenges leaders face.
Focusing on a few key areas will help. Here are three essential changes in mindset that will get you on your way:
- moving from hierarchies to networks;
- shifting the emphasis from documents to knowledge; and
- embedding KM within every process, rather than treating it separately.
The article is really about a shift from hiding knowledge to making it the currency of the organization. How is knowledge hidden? It is implicit in the design of the organization and in the design of information technology. Hierarchical organizations are designed to manage the flow of information, but they also stifle the flow across hierarchies. IT systems are designed to handle "stuff," mostly documents. If the IT system is the cornerstone, then it is the stuff on which people focus
Murray describes the shifts with two pairs of figures to show the current and future state of organizations as they make these shifts. These aren't in the online article, but the concepts should be fairly clear from the text.
The first diagram shows current focus on documenting "stuff" and missing the hidden backchannel of conversations and discussions. The Enterprise of the Future needs to bring those discussions and stories to the forefront with documentation as supporting materials, sitting in the background.