Knowledge management framework - Procedures

Procedures Organisational consultants are trying to convince the corporate world that without knowledge management it will return to the dark ages (aka 'the good times') where corporate despots ruled and a blanket of all consuming ignorance smothered the dawning of the new 'knowledge' era of enlightenment. The level of organisational ignorance is more than the gathering of a workforce of ignorant employees- workers, with all of their knowledge surgically removed and placed in impenetrable vaults and kept blissfully in the dark. Such ignorance has to be maintained. It must be embedded within the organisational culture, systematised and procedurised. Without managing the 'ignorance environment' knowledge as a concept will raise its ugly head. Pools of knowledge will start to fester and to grow, workers will start sharing knowledge and recording it for all the world to see, and before you know it they'll be insisting that you actually start doing something to facilitate it and them. For goodness sake, they might one day expect a minimum wage or Union recognition, or equal rights for men and women. Clearly, knowledge must be stamped out.

knowledge extraction and transfer One of the unfortunate aspects of the knowledge era is the increasing tendency of knowledge workers to exercise their right to choose where they work. They can choose to leave your company taking with them all the knowledge that is still of value to your organisation. Other than blackmailing them or having them, er, debriefed, in the car park (frowned upon by personnel management) there is little you can do other than ensuring that knowledge is regularly extracted from them and transferred for company use into the knowledge vault, thereby keeping them ignorant. Some of the larger American companies have proposed setting up a scientific study program for researching the possibility of removing the brain of an employee and replacing it with the brain of a pig. Quite where they will find Police officers willing to be donors however, we can't imagine.