Some Defining Points ...

Recently, Luis Suarez blogged about about an interview he had given about some of the questions which are on the minds of a large number of knowledge managers, and not just knowledge managers, at that. What i liked about the interview was that some of the basic questions which a lot of people have on their minds were asked, and answered, and not too much jargon, at that.

There were, however, a few things which stood out, which i thought required to be blogged about.

First, the idea that organizational knowledge is a combination of structured and unstructured knowledge. Now, this seems to be a reasonably well-established idea, but maybe not as much as one would think it would be. Quite a few of the people i interact with give me the idea that in more organizations than one would think, structured information still is what knowledge is considered to be. And therefore, the focus becomes the document management systems, with not much highlight on the unstructured part of knowledge.

Another thing that Luis talks about, which i think is an important of the emerging aspect of social, as represented by social computing, social networks, etc., is that of letting go of control. This is easy to discuss, but that much more difficult to implement, though, and is probably something which would be more of a gradual process, taking far more time than one might think, as organizations get to understand the implications of this, and develop the confidence that letting go control is not about a free-for-all. Rather, i would say that its about letting go control in specific ways, rather than replace hierarchy altogether.

Another aspect Luis talks about is the knowledge is power aspect. This is something which i like to discuss whenever making a presentation about Knowledge Management. Thing is, we have grown up with this paradigm, and it is only recently (if you have a few gray hair, you would think of this as being recent) that this paradigm is being dismantled by the evolution of technology. Probably today we are seeing a statte of transition with respect to this, but this is happening.