Here are some of the latest postings from the ongoing discussion about knowledge management (KM) practices in the IntelligentKM.com Forum:
One anonymous poster providing this concluding observation in his
remarks on posted commentary from Dave Head and Denham Grey:
"I've been working on KM projects since the early '80s and the closest I've come to a decent, practical, KM methodology is an adaptation of Peter Senge's Fifth Discipline workbook."
Head elaborated on his posting while answering the anonymous post with these comments:
"How have you utilized Senge's workbook in your KM work? I had a colleague at a previous job who believed there was some overlap there.
"I guess the problem I am seeing is that the concepts of KM are so esoteric that bringing them into practice becomes extremely difficult in any functional way. Are we doing ourselves a disservice by wrapping collaboration, intellectual capital, [and] organizational learning in the KM blanket? My experiences are beginning to show me that in many ways these
capabilities are coming into play within organizations without the need for styling them as KM. It tends to confuse the issue a great deal. Just explaining the concepts is difficult enough (if I have to answer the 'What is a Knowledge Manager?' question again...). I realize the literature bears out
significant success in many companies with formal KM, but as I've begun to read further and to dig under the covers of some of [these
efforts], the success is still marginal and the overall payback still difficult to determine. If we can accomplish many of the goals of KM by building them into the functions of traditional HR and IS, will we not achieve the same goals without creating greater confusion within an otherwise already confusing work environment?"
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eNough
Already!
In response to Justin Kestelyn's August 1 editorial "Mad Dogs and
Englishmen" and his beef No. 1, "Stop Mangling the English Language": AMEN!!
I am also tired of seeing everything related to the Internet beginning with an "e." Doesn't it make more sense to start all things Internet with an "i"? Isn't this one of those things that makes you go, "Huh?"
I have a theory that these labels were created by people who graduated from the McDonald's school of marketing, where they were all taught to prefix every new menu item with "Mc." Some of them then must have moved on to the Microsoft school of marketing where they learned the little marketing rhyme, "Change the c to y and make it My." Thus they exposed us to
MyBriefcase and MyComputer. This MyPlague has since oozed out into other businesses and brought us such memorable hits as MySAP.com, MyYahoo,
MyFillInTheBlank, and so on. Excuse me, but MyMakeMeGag.
Of the 26 letters of the English alphabet, the letter "e" is used most frequently; yet in 1938 Ernest Vincent Wright managed to write Gadsby, a story of more than 50,000 words, without once using the letter "e." I think this work should be required reading for anyone entering the field of "technology marketing."
Randy Reaves
Moline, IL
