denotes premium content | May 21 2013 Inside Knowledge Magazine /Knowledge Management Magazine Archive
Volume 14 Issue 5
Features
Eight questions: Part III
It’s been about fostering a better understanding of the people and behavioural sides of KM. There are two books that are a must-read for anyone in this area. The first is Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel Pink. In a nutshell he says that we need to be careful about how we reward people because, by and large, rewards don’t work.
Eight questions: Part I
I think the biggest development was the demand for KM services. An increasing number of organisations across a variety of fields, including healthcare, the legal profession, and engineering (as well as rising demand in the public sector) seem to have recognised the value in a strategic approach to KM.
Eight questions: Part II
What we have seen is the mainstreaming of social media tools supporting KM. There’s a higher level of acceptability and acceptance and a growing expectation amongst employees, who want to see some of those features available within their organisations as well as operating outside the boundaries. I’m seeing organisations rehabilitating their strategies in order to formally embrace social media and Web 2.0.
Sleeping giant
The paradigm of a knowledge-based economy is not neoteric to India. The country’s past contributions to philosophy, medicine, science and technology, mathematics and astronomy support the view that the sub-continent has been a leading knowledge economy for centuries. In real fiscal terms, India was the largest economy in the world in the first millennium, producing approximately one third of global gross domestic product (GDP). By around 1500 its share dropped to 24 per cent – as China quickly played catch-up and Western Europe’s share of the pie began to grow.
The right side of the law
Assuming that the majority of the readers of this publication will be in the business sector, then an examination of the opportunities and risks of either doing business or promoting the goods or services which they supply in the online and Web 2.0 environment seems like a logical place to start.
The explosion in commercial use of the internet gave birth to a whole new way of doing business: e-commerce. The umbrella term refers to any kind of commercial activity carried out using electronic methods.
Beyond bookshelves
If you search the internet for ‘future of libraries’ or ‘changing role of librarians’ you will read a lot of comments about books disappearing from shelves; about archives of information no longer being accessed; and users wanting to find all their information online. Ask a librarian and they will agree that there is a shift in the information needs of library patrons. What you will also hear is that there is a continuing role for the libraries in public, corporate, government and other environments.
At the helm
In the 1990s the role of chief knowledge officer (CKO) began to emerge. One motivator for this was to differentiate the role from chief information officer or head of IT as a way of emphasising that KM is not principally about IT. At KPMG, for example, Ian McBride became the first incumbent in the newly created CKO role in Australia in 1998. At that time he reported to the chief operating officer and also had a dotted line relationship to KPMG’s global CKO in Boston.
Regulars
Four four two
New Year, new challenges. But the more things change the more they stay the same. I was skimming through a KM report which brought it home. It concluded that after all these years, while the technology has matured, the biggest barriers to effective implementation remain cultural – such as organisational politics and the need to change working practices.
Flirting with disaster
Would you consider Apple CEO Steve Jobs a failure? Maybe the biggest in the world? Probably not. But he is almost certainly someone who has failed. And because he has been prepared to fail and, more importantly, to learn lessons and understand intelligence provided from these failures, he is now one of the leading thought leaders in the world of business and leisure technology.
Making sense
In the early days, social tools (blogs, wikis and the like) tended to be called social networking or social computing but as these tools entered the corporate realm, the dominant name became social media.
More recently, social tools have been widely adopted within organisations and called Enterprise 2.0 to set them apart from their use on the web and the realm of Web 2.0.
Back in 2007, I was one of the first to talk about social KM – using social tools to help manage and share knowledge.
