Content area
Full Text
Keywords
Just-in-time, Knowledge management, Systems theory, Business process re-engineering
Abstract
We are reaching the end of the second generation of knowledge management, with its focus on tacit-explicit knowledge conversion. Triggered by the SECI model of Nonaka, it replaced a first generation focus on timely information provision for decision support and in support of BPR initiatives. Like BPR it has substantially failed to deliver on its promised benefits, The third generation requires the clear separation of context, narrative and content management and challenges the orthodoxy of scientific management. Complex adaptive systems theory is used to create a sense-making model that utilises self-- organising capabilities of the informal communities and identifies a natural flow model of knowledge creation, disruption and utilisation. However, the argument from nature of many complexity thinkers is rejected given the human capability to create order and predictability through collective and individual acts of freewill. Knowledge is seen paradoxically, as both a thing and a flow requiring diverse management approaches.
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Introduction
The contention of this paper is that we are entering a third age in the management of knowledge. Further, that the conceptual changes required for both academics and management are substantial, effectively bounding or restricting over a 100 years of management science in a similar way to the bounding of Newtonian science by the discoveries and conceptual insights of quantum mechanics et al. in the middle of the last century. These changes are not incremental, but require a phase shift in thinking that appears problematic, but once made reveals a new simplicity without the simplistic and formulaic solutions of too much practice in this domain. A historical equivalent is the phase shift from the domination of dogma in the late medieval period, to the enlightenment; moving from esoteric complication to a new simplicity based on a new understanding of the nature of meaning.
The first age: information for decision support
The first age, prior to 1995, sees knowledge being managed, but the word itself is not problematic, the focus is on the appropriate structuring and flow of information to decision makers and the computerisation of major business applications leading to a...