Knowledge management and horizontal organizations…

Knowledge management and horizontal organizations.


Article : Building Horizontal Companies – The Job …. Article : Building Horizontal Companies – The Job KM has Come to Finish :
“? ?Knowledge management? may sound like a nebulous term, but it really refers to an attempt to make sense of a new order of business in which information needs to be organised, stored and transmitted in the right way to the right people, at the right time ? What has KM really achieved through all the hype and expense? Have we really learnt how to ‘manage knowledge’? Is there really anything new in all the KM literature? My view is that it?s not really important to know; rather to listen to KM?s true message of change. KM is actually just the culmination of a few important trends, a first clumsy attempt to make sense of a new order of business”
* Downloadable as a 4-page, 87 KB PDF
* Go to Building Horizontal Companies – The Job KM has Come to Finish, listed in the December 2002 News section of Sveiby Knowledge Management [SynapShots]

You have to love any article that identifies a Chief Knowledge Officer as one of the enemies of successful knowledge management:

These well-intentioned folk really soothe the souls of everyone mentioned so far ? a nicely isolated department that allows a company to feel that they are “doing something about KM” without having to embark upon the arduous journey of creating a truly horizontal organisation. These people, incidentally, believe that KM has its own ROI separate from the value the company creates from its knowledge assets.


This is a relatively short piece, but spot on in terms of seeing knowledge management as primarily the first signs of new organizations that live fully in an economy of services and ideas more than products.


Let me also put in a plug here for SynapShots, an excellent site done by Peter West that collects and organizes a seemingly endless supply of relevant and useful material about knowledge management.

[McGee’s Musings]