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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
Making sense of Knowledge Management, 16 May 2002
This book is emblazoned across the top of more than a dozen journals and magazines and a mere click away on thousands more Web sites. It is the subject of mountains of scholarly papers and books, and the cause behind numerous conferences and meetings. It is Knowledge Management, a new paradigm that has firmly stamped its formidable presence on both academia and business. Although a single paradigm may serve many groups for a while, eventually as newer theories evolve, people begin taking sides. .Learning-centric vs. information-centric are two such sides in the maturation of Knowledge Management. Weighing in on the side of the learning-centric group is this latest release from MIT Press, edited by two MITRE knowledge management experts. Identifying, managing, and sharing are key to this approach. The MITRE editors differ, contending that “it does not matter how you manage your information if it cannot be understood and turned into actionable knowledge—the ability to do.” Their learning-centric bias then “emphasizes that knowledge is the capability to act effectively and is derived from learning.” In support of their view, Morey, Maybury, and Thuraisingham have culled from eighteen papers written by champions of the learning-centric approach, and divided them into three view-defining sections: Strategy, Process, and Metrics. Contributions range from what the editors call “Classic Work,” influential and seminal insight by such thinkers in the field as Peter Senge, Takeuchi and Nonaka, and Kaplan and Norton. Still others are authored by the equally well-known theorists and practitioners Karl-Erik Sveiby, Rüdiger Reinhardt, and Gordon Petrash. Wending their way to a fuller understanding of the learning-centric view, the papers touch on the hot buttons of the Knowledge Management movement: building learning organizations, tacit knowledge, knowledge sharing, learning and growth, intellectual capital, and knowledge creation, to name but a few. In a deft use of their own position that information is actionable knowledge, the editors make the book do double duty by also showing the reader how to use the individual papers as a handbook to help start their organization’s own Knowledge Management movement. The Preface organizes eleven of the papers into a collection that outlines the process to follow. It concludes with a note of encouragement: “Knowledge management programs can yield impressive benefits to individuals and organizations if they are purposeful, concrete, and action oriented. Make yours so.” Margaret Wheatley’s Introduction to the book is a brief but remarkable entryway into both the discipline of Knowledge Management as well as the lessons to be learned from the papers within. Wheatley leaves the reader with a common sense guide to tote along on the journey.
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