Whither Fordism
KM debate continues concerning process and bureaucracy. Methods like these, including hierarchy, are positively essential and needed of course. For example, they help allocate resources, furnish continuity, assure compliance, etc. They are also a comprehensive social system, without question. Their outcomes are predictable and deterministic.
However, the problem is that very naïve and arrogant people have tried to modulate processes and bureaucracy to control organizational knowledge. It is where the dopey ‘KM Certification’ farce originated, for example.
Meanwhile, many KM people still make surprising Fordist remarks such as, "processes provide a kind of "guided knowledge transfer" to allow people to execute tasks as a proxy on behalf of others..." This is fine for process serfs and transaction apparatchiks but is completely wrong for knowledge, knowledge workers, and for KM. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fordism
For authentic KM, activities must be >50% knowledge-based, and not information-based. Knowledge-based work is judgment-oriented, depends on scarce expertise, emergent, relies on working with others, is creative, is non-deterministic, etc.
KM must strive to drop the Fordist model. Rather, pursue distributed phronetic social science to achieve fundamental and continuous advancements in genuine knowledge-based activities and KM.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phronesis_in_social_science
One of the major reasons why KM systems fail: they are data volume based systems effectively shutting off a potentially KM system by burying useful/expert know-how under a massive pile of dud data. Dud KM systems are built everywhere, for it is chic to boast about KM system, for dud KM systems are useful in propagation of knowledge organisation myth and they also provide sanctuary for the inept KMers. With dud KM systems, KMers can herd employees into Communities Of Practice (COPs), organizing all sorts of shallow discussions around a cooler or in war rooms, or knowledge sharing workshops, etc. Garbage and gossip is always liberally available and shared happily. On the other hand, acquisition of expert or highly useful knowledge requires expertise, few have. The source of knowledge must be managed prudently, not squandered by casting pearls of knowledge before swine.
Knowledge sharing could succeed in Affinity Groups (AG) environment, where the minds even from different disciplines bond for a Common Purpose (CP). Affinity and the CP are far stronger stimulants to share knowledge than COPs. People are complex creatures, Knowledgeable People are impossibly complex; herding them into COPs they did not ask for, will not stimulate their minds to share knowledge. Of course AG and CP are only as good as the KM who puts such environment together, thus even within the best AG environment, knowledge sharing is not assured. AG is merely an environment. A truly outstanding KM will be able to facilitate knowledge interchange.
As a long time researcher of knowledge, cognitive dexterity as well as a practitioner of knowledge diffusion, I am persuaded that there is no such thing as Knowledge Management beyond the minds of those who possess the knowledge. The owners of the knowledge are the mangers of their knowledge and they manage it according to:
1. Environment they operate
2. Emotional impulses.
3. Commercial consideration.
4. Ulterior motives.
5. Prevailing circumstances.
6. Cultural & ethnic baggage, bondage and taboos.
7. Ethical predisposition.
After many years in the KM arena, I find the KM circus amusing, with its colourful balloons filled with He, floating everywhere. Occasionally, usually just before the performance review a KMer pricks a KM balloon producing a loud bang to the amazement and delight of the busybody KM crowd and the lousy management.
"Solid arguments are lost on shallow minds. Yet what else are we to use? We are bound to give them reasons; but we are not called upon to give them understanding." - Charles Spurgeon
We live in a woeful KM era where bangs are applauded, vulgarity is passed as being piquant or avant-garde and sloganism is mandated. Measurable results gave ways to eclectic slogans that tickle bosses' senses. Lord Byron described his society so aptly: "Society is now one polished horde, formed of two mighty tribes, the bores and the bored."
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