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Introduction to Knowledge Management 23

2. Leaner organizations We are doing more and we are doing it faster, but we also
need to work smarter as knowledge workers — increased pace and workload.
3. Corporate amnesia We are more mobile as a workforce, which creates problems of
knowledge continuity for the organization, and places continuous learning demands
on the knowledge worker — we no longer expect to work for the same organization for
our entire career.
4. Technological advances We are more connected — information technology advances
have made connectivity not only ubiquitous but has radically changed expectations:
we are expected to be on at all times and the turnaround time in responding is now
measured in minutes, not weeks.

Today ’ s work environment is more complex due to the increase in the number of
subjective knowledge items we need to attend to every day. Filtering over two hundred
e-mails, faxes, and voice mail messages on a daily basis should be done according to
good time management practices and fi ltering rules, but more often than not, workers
tend to exhibit a Pavlovian refl ex to beeps announcing the arrival of new mail or the
ringing of the phone that demands immediate attention. Knowledge workers are
increasingly being asked to think on their feet with little time to digest and analyze
incoming data and information, let alone time to retrieve, access, and apply relevant
experiential knowledge. This is due both to the sheer volume of tasks to attend to, as
well as the greatly diminished turnaround time. Today ’ s expectation is that everyone
is on all the time — as evidenced by the various messages embodying annoyance at not
having connected, such as voice mails asking why you have not responded to an
e-mail, and e-mails asking why you have not returned a call!
Knowledge management represents one response to the challenge of trying to
manage this complex, information overloaded work environment. As such, KM is
perhaps best categorized as a science of complexity. One of the largest contributors to
the complexity is that information overload represents only the tip of the iceberg —
only that information that has been rendered explicit. KM must also deal with the
yet to be articulated or tacit knowledge. To further complicate matters, we may not
even be aware of all the tacit knowledge that exists — we may not know that we don ’ t
know . Maynard Keynes (in Wells 1938 , 6) hit upon a truism when he stated “ these
. . . directive people who are in authority over us, know scarcely anything about the
business they have in hand. Nobody knows very much, but the important thing to
realize is that they do not even know what is to be known. ” Though he was address-
ing politics and the economic consequences of peace, today ’ s organizational leaders
have echoed his words countless times.