Articles

How does a knowledge manager acquire the appropriate competencies in a professional, structured way? Knowledge management novices often look to certification programmes to give the necessary assurance, and there is no shortage of providers to step up to the mark. But to evaluate the merits of certification programmes, we really need to have a clearer understanding of the competencies we want to build.

Posted on 13 January 2006

There is a profound and dangerous autism in the way we describe knowledge management and e-learning. At its root is an obsessive fascination with the idea of knowledge as content, as object, and as manipulable artefact. It is accompanied by an almost psychotic blindness to the human experiences of knowing, learning, communicating, formulating, recognising, adapting, miscommunicating, forgetting, noticing, ignoring, choosing, liking, disliking, remembering and misremembering.

Posted on 2 July 2002

By around 1778 or 1779, the Scottish chemist and entrepreneur James Keir had spent a decade seeking a commercial process for the production of alkalis. Alkalis had been used in the glass industry and in the glazing process for pottery for centuries. However, demand was growing rapidly throughout the 18 th century, with a growing market for soap (made by mixing alkalis with oil and then curdling it with salt) and for its use as a bleaching agent in the booming textile industry…

Posted on 27 March 2003

Knowledge management as traditionally espoused has two main strands: dealing with the aggregation of knowledge and the transfer of knowledge. However this official discourse and its key concepts grew out of the experience of large, mature, highly structured and dispersed enterprises. Looking at the environment in which small enterprises work suggests a different set of key concepts, looking at the notions of experience and structural capital as key knowledge manipulation tools. These tools are particularly relevant to environments of high uncertainty, volatility and risk – and so also have a significant contribution to make to the direction of knowledge management for larger enterprises, where adaptiveness and ignorance management tools are becoming increasingly important.

Posted on 1 April 2002

At a knowledge management workshop recently, I passed around a small plastic box to the participants. “Here,” I said, “put some knowledge in here.” Some participants just stared. One or two wrote something down on a piece of paper and put it in. But of course, the aim was not to collect pieces of paper, but to try to characterise the dilemma that is knowledge management. We moved on into a discussion of what KM is, and how the KM industry represents itself. Is it really about aggregating pieces of what people know – on piece of paper or in digital format? Others felt it was about promoting a culture of knowledge-sharing. If technology was involved, it was about giving people access to each other, and making it easy to collaborate.

Posted on 17 July 2001

When you look at success in business, you get a compelling sense of the true momentum behind the old economy. Almost half of the 500 most successful SMEs in Singapore are in the construction and manufacturing related industries, and when you look at this year’s top fifty companies, that figure rises to 60%. The highly touted new economy sectors of logistics and financial and business services barely register in the top fifty companies, and make up only a quarter of the top five hundred.

Posted on 23 November 2000

We recently did a small information management/knowledge management internal initiative at Straits Knowledge. The relative ease with which we did it, compared to the problems faced by several of our clients (much larger organisations) has got me pondering on the way that existing infrastructure impacts an organisation’s current effectiveness, both positively and negatively. In this article I use the case study of our internal initiative to analyse the way that infrastructure in large organisations imposes friction on the rate of change, and propose some project management and change management strategies to deal with that friction.

Posted on 15 June 2006

Videos

On Being A Knowledge Manager: Conversation with Patricia Eng

This was a conversation Patrick had in June 2010 with Patricia Eng, Senior Knowledge Management Advisor at the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Patrick had met Patricia at KM World the previous November, and was impressed by her passionate, no-nonsense, deeply practical approach to KM. In this interview we explore how she got into KM, and what it takes to be effective in a knowledge management role.

Virtues and Vices in KM

The slides and accompanying audio of a talk given by Patrick  to the ACT KM Forum in Canberra on 14 August 2007. The talk looks at bad practices in KM and why it's so hard to improve them.

From Cataloguers to Designers: Paul Otlet, Social Impact, and a More Proactive Role for Knowledge Organisation Professionals

From cataloguers to designers: Paul Otlet, social impact and a more proactive role for knowledge organization professionals - video presentation for ISKO UK biennial conference 13th – 14th July 2015, London "Knowledge Organization – making a difference. The impact of knowledge organization on society, scholarship and progress."

Is KM Dead?

In a conversation held in Kuala Lumpur on July 1st 2008, Larry Prusak, Dave Snowden and Patrick Lambe discuss the topic of whether KM is dead or dying, and what lies in store for it.