I don't know if this helps, but on the practical side, a big message coming from
the consultancies (e.g. KPMG in the UK, but I think the advice is fairly
universal) is that the key to Knowledge Management is organisational. In other
words, if you haven't got the kind of organisational setup and attitudes that
will benefit from KM (and many haven't), then attempts to impose KM tools and
working practices are not going to help. See for instance
http://www.kpmg.co.uk/uk/services/manage/research/knowmgmt/index.html.
This is a philosophical point, of course. Organisations whose structure is
hierarchical and internally competitive are not going to benefit, because there
is an animus against sharing knowledge: "knowledge is power" in this scheme of
thought, and to share knowledge is therefore to detract from your powerbase. No
amount of KM tools will change this. (I guess not all academics are free from
this attitude either!)
Not all (perhaps not many) organisations would admit to having such a
philosophy, but in many it is there to a degree, being in fact very difficult to
get rid of in large corporates with a history of fear politics. The degree to
which these attitudes persist more or less equates to the degree to which taking
on a KM environment will fail. One has also to draw a distinction between the
official "rhetoric" of sharing and enablement, and the actual practice within
corporations, which tends to lag behind - hopefully it catches up eventually.
I would be surprised if the rest of Europe were free of these unconscious
anti-KM attitudes, I'm certain they exist in the UK. After all, human nature is
the same everywhere. Research in Europe (as opposed to business practice) may
possibly be less corporation-dominated than in America, but the economic squeeze
is certainly causing a trend both towards "take-up" in collaborative
pan-European projects with Commission funding, and (in the UK anyway) towards
private funding in places of learning, with consequently increased emphasis on
pragmatic goals.
Hope this helps.
Ian Davies
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