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The KM Team 417

McElroy (2002) discusses recent accounting scandals that highlight the dangers of
allowing dysfunctional knowledge processing in a corporate context. He points
out that knowledge management can help generate a greater sense of openness in
managerial decision making. KM can promote ethics by enhancing transparency in
management where transparency is defi ned as openness with respect to knowledge
and knowledge processes. In this way, it becomes possible to identify dysfunctional
knowledge processes and bad practices or ideas. KM deals explicitly with the
manner in which organizational knowledge is produced and integrated into practice.
Openness should contribute not only to more ethical business practices but also to
innovation
KM is the one management discipline that concerns itself with managing the
quality and complexion of knowledge processing. KM, and no other body of man-
agement practice, deals explicitly with the manner in which organizational knowl-
edge is produced and integrated into practice. The transparency problem in business
is fundamentally a knowledge management problem, because bad practice is nothing
more than bad knowledge in use, and bad knowledge in use is the product of dys-
functional knowledge processing. Separately, we can see that a move toward
more openness or transparency in organizations not only has an impact on illicit
behaviors but also serves to enhance innovation through greater inclusiveness in
knowledge processing. By involving higher proportions of stakeholders in knowledge
production and integration, organizations can avail themselves of both more quality
control over knowledge in use and more stakeholder participation in the process,
thereby adding to the depth and breadth of organizational creativity. Openness is,
at once, a prescription for enhancing both corporate responsibility and business
innovation.
It is also clear that knowledge management is uniquely well equipped to assist
organizations in making the transition from relative states of closure to greater open-
ness in knowledge processing, primarily because KM is a management discipline that
seeks to enhance knowledge processing. The targets of its interventions are always
knowledge processing behaviors, not just their outcomes. This is often referred to as
the transparency of an organization ( Tapscott and Ticoll 2003 ).
In terms of knowledge processing behaviors, ethics in KM consists of valuing
human beings. Ethics is often considered to be a simple matter, whereas it most
defi nitely is not. Much of ethics can be distilled down to boundaries — boundaries
that can help employees of an organization stay on the correct side of organizational
policy and can help clarify ethical issues ( Groff and Jones 2003 ). Some examples of
boundaries are landmarks, fences, and DMZs (demilitarized zones). A landmark is a