Sunday, April 21, 2002

The Knowledge Management Panel on Wednesday evening was filled with insightful discussion and dialogue.  A few interesting comments included the following: KM can't be successful without sponsorship from Sr. Management - This seems to favor the "top down" perspective vs. the bottom-up and thus it seems debatable but panelist Kent Barnett was fairly adamant about this point. To advance the field of KM, some consistency in terminology needs to be developed.  There still seems to be quite a bit of confusion around what is KM?  what is Knowledge? what is wisdom?  how are these things different from data and information and documents?  Panelist Kevin Moore described the difference between data, information, knowledge and wisdom as as contextual.  Each level requires substantively more context than the last.  There are two broad types of KM: managing information/documents (also thought of as explicit knowledge) and managing connections between people (the best way to manage tacit knowledge).  The former may use things like web sites, document repositories, and even web logs.  The latter will use e-mail, cell phones, instant messaging and "expert lookups".  Both types can be valuable under different scenarios. Panelist Kent Barnett pointed out that we have been struggling with KM for decades, we simply did not call it that.  However, it was generally agreed upon that until the recent 5 - 10 years we did not have the tools to really make the headway on the issue that we can now. Panelist Chuck Fred put forth the belief that we still have a long way to go before corporations see the implicit value in KM and before executives see it as mission critical in the way they do some other functions such as marketing.  Few firms view marketing as "an initiative" nor do they generally try to measure the ROI - they simply understand it's necessary for the firm to succeed.  However, he was very encouraged that leading MBA schools are now recognizing the importance of the issue. There were many other insights but these were some of the ones that stuck with me.     10:58:24 PM

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