Ashutosh Nilkanth’s Blog

Knowledge Management Systems

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Here’s an excerpt from a very interesting article I read on Knowledge Management Systems by Alan Ward.

In his book “Future Shock”, Alvin Toffler notes that if you were to take the time that human beings have been in existence (about 50,000 years) and divide this time into 62-year average lifetimes, you would get 800 lifetimes. Of those 800 lifetimes:

• 650 of them have been in caves.
• It is only in the last 70 lifetimes that humans have been able to communicate across generations.
• It is only in the last 6 that there has been the printed word.
• It is only in the last 4 that we have been able to measure time with any accuracy.
• It is only in the last 2 that there has been the electric motor.
• Most of the technology that we are so familiar with has been brought into existence in our lifetime.

No wonder our people are feeling “change weary”. It is our observation that despite this rate of change, with respect to organisational shifts, people are more “change wary” than “change weary” and this is because in the majority of cases they are not allowed or encouraged to play an active role in determining how the work that they do will need to change to accommodate shifts in organisational objectives. Too often we see poorly thought through change management initiatives that have been inadequately prepared and resourced inflicted on the workforce rather than engaging them early in the process to determine what needs to change to most effectively deliver the shifting organisational goals.

Considering the extent of human interaction throughout the ages, a natural initial response to any sort of group discussion is a feeling of apprehension due to a lack of collective and widespread ideology. It is often hard for individuals to submerge in a creative and thought-provoking discussion with an open and shrewd state of mind. However, through innate introspection and reciprocal trust, human beings can communicate more effectively and tactically, so as to accomplish any common objective.

Essentially a blog or a wiki are new age forms of Knowledge Management Systems.