Contrast these two paragraphs, each designed to convey the value propositions of knowledge management to an unaware, perhaps skeptical, audience of executives:
1. Knowledge Management caters to the critical issues of organizational adaptation, survival and competence in face of increasingly discontinuous change. Essentially, it embodies organizational processes that seek synergistic combination of information processing capacity of information technologies, and the creative and innovative capacity of human beings.
2. In June 1995, a health worker in Kamana, Zambia, logged on to the CDC website in Atlanta and got the answer, posted by an unknown associate in Indonesia, to a question on how to treat malaria.
Even if the audience has no experience in health care, they immediately relate better to the second argument, even though it is less comprehensive an explanation of the benefits of knowledge management. The story engages them in ways the factual argument cannot.
I had an email exchange with a librarian at my workplace a few weeks: she has recently been charged with finding ways to integrate technology into the learning process, and I sent her a couple of recent links on KM, thinking they might be useful.
Her reply was that KM wasn’t anything she was interested in. At the time, I was surprised and puzzled, but after reading these two examples, I’m really disappointed. A culture that isn’t even aware of how little it knows about itself is an amazing phenomenon, and not altogether enjoyable.