Posted by Daan de Koning on November 07, 1999 at 08:25:16:

In Reply to: Decision making & KM posted by Denham on October 31, 1999 at 17:09:15:

Denham

Suppose there exists, somewhere in this universe, a (or perhaps more then one but one is enough for my argument) an Information Manager who "spends all his time looking at the security, the reach, the access, the architecture, the workflow, the represenation and the efficiency of his information delivery mechanism", who neglects the "people issues", who disregards "awareness, relationships, future positioning, agility, learning, leadership & decisions", someone who indeed "ranks access and connectivity far below innovation and dialog".

Suppose we find him, well, I would say we then have found ourselves a LOUSY information manager.

As far as I know it was Peter Drucker (guru of management guru's) who first introduced the term Knowledge Worker, as an opposite to manual labour. The first question that arises when speaking of knowledge MANAGEMENT would then be:
Do these knowledge WORKERS allow it to be managed by anyone other then themselves. (In his later work Peter Drucker emphasizes Self Management, giving a hint that the answer on the FIRST question on KM is NO).

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There are (at least) two ways of looking at Knowledge Management. One is: The Management of Knowledge Intensive Organisations. Two is: The Control of Knowledge in Organisations. (spot the 10 differences) Somehow I've got the feeling that organisations who percieve knowledge management as the way to control, own and manipulate "their" knowledge are either to arrogant to survive the competition or are in fact not knowledge intensive enough to be hurt by the consequences of their way of "knwoledge" management.

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Re-reading your writings, I do not think we really disagree, hmmm......
:)

However, I do feel that the debate on the differences between information management and knowledge management, are leading away from a much more interesting KM topic: How to manage knowledge intensive organisations, or How to manage these "unmanageable" knowledge workers?

Kind Regards
Daan de Koning

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