"Within IBM, there?s an interesting disconnect between Cooper's team and Larry Prusak's IBM Institute for Knowledge Management, a research group located just across the street from Cooper in Cambridge. While Cooper is trying to sell a sophisticated piece of software that uses automated spiders, linguistic analysis, and Bayesian arithmetic to create topical clusters of documents and identify in-house gurus, Prusak is publishing books and articles that say that the key to developing the kind of strong relationships that make companies more effective -- what he calls social capital -- has nothing to do with software.

In an article in the June issue of the Harvard Business Review, Prusak argues that virtuality -- collaborating with colleagues in an online chat-room, for example -- can eat away at the social fabric of an organization."

Outsights Knowledge Management -- Emerging Perspectives

"Yes, knowledge management is the hottest subject of the day. The question is: what is this activity called knowledge management, and why is it so important to each and every one of us? The following writings, articles, and links offer some emerging perspectives in response to these questions. As you read on, you can determine whether it all makes any sense or not."

redux [05.28.01]
The New York Times I.B.M. Meets With 52,600, Virtually
[requires 'free' registration]

""Intuitively, people feel there should be immense value in knowledge sharing, but no one has gotten their arms around how you do it in a large organization and how you measure its effect," said Steven L. Telleen, an analyst at the Giga Information Group, a technology research firm based in Cambridge, Mass.

IBM Research Fostering the Collaborative Creation of Knowledge: A White Paper

""Good" HCI design practice then, is viewed here not simply as a more practical way to improve productivity on a specific job. It is conceived of as part of larger movement to use technology to foster a more community-based, more contextualized, more systems-oriented view of human knowledge. The consequences include greater chances for improved productivity in the small, but also, in the large, the consequences may include a move toward greater trust and cooperation; less feeling of isolation; more feeling of connectedness; hence, ultimately, more ecologically sound behavior."

redux [05.24.01]
Fortune I Know What You Mean. And I Can't Do Anything About It.

"Knowledge is power.

No, it's not. This deceitful truism is the Big Lie of the Information Age. For most people in most organizations, knowledge confers impotence, not power.

No, it's not. This deceitful truism is the Big Lie of the Information Age. For most people in most organizations, knowledge confers impotence, not power.

"That's not to say that enterprises should err on the side of concealing rather than revealing knowledge. But it is in everyone's best interest to be honest about the organizational reality that knowledge is seldom power. On the contrary, knowledge confirms the absence of meaningful power. Working with that proposition is the true challenge for those zealots who advocate "knowledge management.""

Michael H. Zack If Managing Knowledge is the Solution, then What's the Problem?

"Knowledge is power.

"Load, from a knowledge perspective then, is the amount of knowledge processing that a firm must perform within some time interval to manage complexity, uncertainty, equivocality and ambiguity to perform its tasks and execute its strategy, as well as to adapt to change and maintain the organization itself. Overload occurs when the organization is unable to perform the amount of processing required because that amount is too great, given the time and resources available. The challenge is for the organization and its members to develop sufficient intellectual resources and processing capabilities to manage or reduce equivo cality, ambiguity, complexity, and uncertainty. Alternately, the organization may manage the knowledge environment generating that load (for example, by reducing the number of customers, serving more stable markets, or taking on simpler or more familiar tasks) to bring it into balance with its capabilities. Strategicaly, organizations must maintain a balance between overload and underload, in that overload reduces performance effectiveness by exceeding capabilities while underload reduces performance effectiveness by a lack of challenging experiences, stimulation for learning, and inefficient use of resources (Hedberg 1981, Tushman and Nadler 1978)."

Knowledge Media Institute Oracles, Bards, and Village Gossips, or, Social Roles and Meta Knowledge Management

"Knowledge management systems are used widely in many different organisations, yet there are few models and theories which can be used to help introduce and apply them successfully. In this paper, we analyse some of the more common problems for knowledge management systems. Using this background, we adapt models and theories from social and organisational psychology and computer supported collaborative work, and discuss a variety of different knowledge management systems in these contexts. We argue that knowledge management systems routinely adopt different social roles within an organisation, and that these social roles can have a major influence on a system's acceptability. With these principles in mind, we draw out some general practical lessons, and a 'character space' framework, which can help to inform the design of future knowledge management systems, so as to minimise the problems of acceptability within a given organisation."