I had another thought about structure and how it affects KM. In KM, there’s acknowledgment that employees — the knowledge holders — are not always so willing to share what they know because knowledge is valuable and can be used to increase status, power and even bargaining position with regard to position and compensation. Management, on the other hand, is keenly interested in separating what people know from the people who know it — makes it easier to wring value from the asset if you own it. Of course, that separation is now widely acknowledged as impossible. So the question is this: how does corporate structure interfere with or encourage resolving the conflict between employee knowledge and management desire to own and leverage it?

I think it has to come back to mechanistic versus organic organizational structures, but maybe this is too simple a dichotomy. What do you think?

-Carmen

I think that the first wave of KM, which was mostly IT and technology focused, was the product of mechanistic organizational structures. Now that more organic structures are needed for improved decision making in constantly changing business environments, KM can more readily evolve from its second-wave focus on explicit vs tacit knowledge capture to a third wave founded in the belief that knowledge is socially constructed and is therefore more readily exchanged and shared in conversation. Flat structures, in which individuals and frontline managers have more autonomy are, in sum, more suited to developing communities of practice and encouraging conversation than top-down hierarchical organizations.

-Carmen