Have you ever read something you wrote a long time ago and then compared it to the way you think today? Cleaning up my home office on the weekend I came across a review I had written about 10 years ago about some research published in Harvard Business Review. The original research article was about knowledge management practices in a number of different organizations. Titled “What’s Your Strategy for Knowledge Management?”, it made an impression on me at the time. The researchers identified two generic approaches that organizations use in order to get value from what they know: Codification: Efficient reuse of experience within a firm through documents and software tools that enable information storage and retrieval. Personalization: Build creative[…]
Category: Leadership
In a recent series of posts on HBR, Susan Cramm talked about the problem of getting IT leaders and business leaders to agree on how to approach system redesign projects. That led naturally enough to a discussion about Big-Bang versus iterative approaches, and how the latter make some business leaders nervous. The paradox is that an iterative approach sounds open-ended and difficult to control, but a well thought-out iterative approach often delivers value to the organization more quickly. That begs the question, what does a well thought-out iterative approach look like? Most system implementation projects involve groups of people learning to work in new ways, so a better way to phrase it might be what does a ‘learning approach’ look[…]