Epic Think Tank
Blending Learning and Knowledge Management
Sven, VBM and the book under the counter
 'Knowledge,'
as Coronation Street's Reg Holdsworth never tired of telling his
deputy manager at Better Buys, 'is power, Curly'. But since the
publication of Thomas A. Stewart's Intellectual Capital in
1997, knowledge has become even more than that. It is The New Wealth
of Organisations; 'the pre-eminent economic resource' in the post-industrial
world - 'more important than raw material; more important, often,
than money'.
So who looks after the organisation's knowledge?
Enter a tranche of freshly-minted job titles - chief knowledge
officer, knowledge architect, knowledge manager… and a whole new
horizontal called knowledge management, with its own exhibitions
and magazines, its own gurus and its own distinctive language.
But hold on a minute. Isn't there another part of the organisation
with certain property rights here - the bit that used to be called
'training'? And doesn't their new web-delivered online learning
gizmo, with its ability to connect learners to knowledge in all
sorts of different formats, promise to do, essentially, the same
sort of thing?
For the seventh of our Epic Think Tanks we brought together practitioners
who have worked in both learning and knowledge management and asked
them to reflect on what these two communities, currently residing
in separate silos, might have to say to each other.
Questions we suggested they might address included:
- What is knowledge management?
- Should we make any distinctions between knowledge management
and learning?
- What is the difference between collaborative communities of
learning, best practice sharing and knowledge management programmes?
The answers astonished even us.
Next>>
1.The personality of knowledge
2. Making the tacit explicit
3. Learning from war stories
4. The book under the counter
5. The convergence of learning and
knowledge management
6. Reward systems in the culture club
7. Modelling the tall poppy
8. Value based management and Sven's
men
9. The Odyssey as quality manual
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