(2002-02-28) d

Jim McGee's notes on a Larry Prusak talk on Knowledge Management. Larry started with an old research design question - what the right unit of analysis. His answer? The group (Team Is The Focus). Not the individual, not the enterprise... He sees knowledge largely in terms of trust and of the conditions where reciprocity works. His evidence says that incentives are useless in knowledge management settings. You have to look to the level where people share without explicit incentives... "Gift culture" is the technical term for what Larry has tagged as one of the driving forces of knowledge creation and uses in organizations... Here's Larry's densely packed definition of knowledge: "embodied, tacit, pattern recognition."... Community is a means to the end of learning how to put knowledge into practice. To IBM's great disappointment, Larry isn't keen on Document Management as a path to better knowledge and he's pretty skeptical about the value of technology tools to nurture communities.