An earlier SMR post addressed the subject of careers in KM/Knowledge Services. Let’s continue. In my work I’m noticing more and more attention being given to different categories of knowledge workers. It’s not a new idea, and in his 1997 book Intellectual Capital: The New Wealth of Organizations (1997) Tom Stewart sorts through the employees doing knowledge work and comes up with a useful description of how the workplace has moved from the agricultural and industrial focus to the more knowledge-focused environment (“The flavor is unmistakable,” Stewart writes: “An ever-growing percentage of people are ‘knowledge workers’: Information and knowledge are…
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Are you beginning to see several points of view about KM in your work? As knowledge workers, we’re exposed to (and are positioned to react to) a wide range of perspectives about how knowledge is managed in the workplace. I’m becoming more and more aware that colleagues (both knowledge workers and “others” – whoever these “others” might be!) are thinking about KM, knowledge services, and knowledge strategy in many different ways. Would it be helpful if we shared some of these different perspectives with one another? As for me, I’m thinking there are probably four ways people think about KM…
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GRATITUDE – CONFIDENCE – HOPE The words come from Stephen Kizza, a librarian with the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources in Kampala, Uganda. In his correspondence and writings, Kizza signs off with a phrase that is both poignant and meaningful to strategic knowledge professionals, particularly those dealing with Africa and KM/knowledge services in the research and business communities of the nations of Africa: ”Look backwards with gratitude, upward with confidence, forward with hope.” Could there be any stronger motivation for us? Could there be any better way to describe our aspirations for our work in Africa? At the recent Special…
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