Wisdom Management

Corporations have been struggling with implementing communities of practice – the lack of organizational structure and employee loyalty to their own work prevented from Communities of Practice from being effective from a managerial perspective.

However, the key to CoPs success is to utilize discussion forums for teams working onto the same goal, and the discussions forums / wikis were used as a tool to do work. Under such circumstances, the employees learned in the process, as a side effect of their completed work.

KM is hard to implement in an established organization, because of cultural issues: people are unwilling to share and are protective of their knowledge.

But this is not so in a startup: when starting a company anew, a KM culture can be developed from the very beginning.

In a new organization, people can enter with the precondition that all work (documents, presentations, etc.) done is posted up on the company wiki for all to see. This way, there are no secrets (save for some sensitive information such as passwords and financial data) – when it comes to the knowledge that fuels the business, everyone shares with everyone from the start.

I’d like to found, or be part of, such a company.