Posted by Reilly Atkinson on June 29, 1999 at 15:12:30:

In Reply to: Re: KM mediator in a... posted by Laurence Smith on June 28, 1999 at 11:22:47:

Hello Laurence; You raise one of the major issues of running a successful organization -- how can we know what's going on in a large organization, who's doing similar stuff. Perhaps these issues of info and knowledge could be placed into the challenge of making an organization intellectually efficient -- perhaps this is too cold a title, smacking, as it does, of command and control and so forth. My hunch is that the only organizations that do well in using knowledge and info well are small organizations, 30 people or less. At least that's my experience.

Big, big organizations like multinationals, governmental agencies -- NASA and the Challenger problem -- suffer huge bandwidth problems: so many people, so many projects, so many ideas, so many possible criteria for deigning knowledge useful, so much change, and so little ability to filter and compress all the info and knowledge and great difficulty with responsive distribution. You are talking making a bureaucracy flexible, responsive and efficient. And, of course in large organizations there's an inevitability of building a "knowledge" bureacracy, the leaders of which will fight for control of their turf much more fiercely than a command and control manager.

From what I can tell, many of the attempts at building knowledge data bases, communities of practice who share their experience ( use to be called seminars, group therapy, or annual meetings of XY professional society)have been tried before under many names. For example, many Universities will for big bucks sell corporations
the right to hang with the research heavies -- bringing the honchos up-to-date with new knowledge and potential opportunities. This sort of knowledge sharing has been quite successful -- largely for command and control outfits.

Attempts to solve the problems of effective communication of key knowledge - the right stuff to the right people at the right time - are admirable and necessary. In fact devising such attempts are a terribly important part of management. But, it seems to me, that at least some people grappling with these problems are unaware of the great and long history of such management issues, and, perhaps, not quite up to speed on the political dimensions of implementing new ways of doing things. Some business school library time might well prove to be beneficial -- sharing knowledge with the old folks who have been there, done that.

Re command and control: it's not always bad, depends greatly on people, politics and the nature of the business. The boss I mentioned earlier viewed his job as a facilitator, a heat shield, a mentor, a PR agency and a salesman. He was happy to share his knowledge of how to work
the system. His notion was that he would spare us all the corporate micky mouse stuff so that we could do our professional work. He did his job, we did our jobs -- which he defined only in very broad terms. There were not too many ego problems, and we had a highly productive run of bring Aerospace Technolgy to the cities.

Smart, talented people will always find ways to beat the system and get the job done -- perhaps that's an area for knowledge mangement folks to investigate - outfits like Bell Labs, Xerox Research Center, IBM's Research labs, investment banks, law firms, medical clinics .... All of these are heavily dependent on knowledge, and the most-up-to date knowledge. There must be some clues there....

Reilly

---

Follow Ups:

• Re: KM mediator in a... John Tieso 08:23:55 6/30/99 (0)
• Re: KM mediator in a... Laurence Smith 17:04:26 6/29/99 (1)
  • Re: KM mediator in a... editor 20:54:25 6/29/99 (0)

---

Click Here to Post Follow Up in New Forums

    Knowledge Management Think Tank (New)

  

 Subject: 

Message: