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Conventional knowledge management is largely about managing knowledge for the benefit of the organisation - it often fails to consider the benefits of managing knowledge from an individual's perspective. This can be bad both for individuals and for organisations. Like it or not individuals - or 'knowledge workers' as they are often referred to in KM jargon - are crucial to the success of knowledge management. Seeing things from their perspective is a useful exercise for all concerned.
That's why it's useful to model the knowledge space occupied by individuals. Often this uncovers the benefits for both individuals and organisations and acts as a useful foundation for a knowledge management initiative.
"What's in it for me?"
This is a vital question to address in the case of KM - particularly when some KM projects are implicitly designed to reduce the organisation's reliance on key knowledge workers. In other words they effectively say 'help us to this in order to reduce your value to us'. Only a few years ago artificial intelligence (AI) and expert systems designers were predicting the rapid rise of knowledge engineers -people who were trained to extract the knowledge of experts and then embed that knowledge in systems that would analyse, predict and decide just like a real human being. But in practice this was a much more complex task than initially predicted - the role people play in continually refining, filtering and connecting elements of knowledge, of synthesising experiences and learning is still way beyond current technology.
Individuals Managing Knowledge
All knowledge workers need to ask themselves the following questions:
What knowledge we have?
How is it useful to the organisation?
How best can I share it with others in the organisation?
What benefit will I gain by sharing my knowledge?
What new knowledge do I need?
We need to adopt a give and take approach - not a take only approach (share Internet story - who actually gives)
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