Knowledge Management
Department of Computer Systems and Communications
Academic Year: 2016-2017
Francesco Caputo
fcaputo@mail.muni.cz
Knowledge Management: What is new?
Really new or déjà vu?
New Old
New:
ü There are many investments in
production and sharing of knowledge.
ü The costs to decode, share and acquire
knowledge are reducing.
ü There are more opportunities to acquire
new knowledge.
The news of knowledge society
The increasing relevance of intangibles
Japan United States
Different approach to the same values
The capability of knowledge to
produce new value is strictly related
to the time.
New paradigms emerge only in a
long time through long periods of
transaction.
It is a question of time
Some researchers refuse the idea that we are in the knowledge era because they
affirm that:
ü Along the time, knowledge was ever been a central element in human life and in
the economy.
ü The changes in managerial and business models imposed by the knowledge
refer only to the domains with a “high level of knowledge”.
ü Only some kinds of work positions require a high cognitive involvement.
We are really living the post-modern era?
More specifically, the reductionist view
is based on the past experiences and it
pays few attention to the possible future
evolutions.
Against, the knowledge society is based
on the future.
The reductionist approach is showing an increasing useless in supporting
understanding and managing of emerging dynamics.
The ‘old’ reductionist approach
The emerging economy is totally cognitive.
Almost all the value is produced or mediated by the knowledge.
A work not based on the knowledge, in the 90% of the case, does not produce new
value.
The cognitive economy
ü Productivity: the knowledge management
offers the opportunity to use new source of
value.
ü Quality: the economy and the society is
acquiring a new form as consequence of
the emerging role of knowledge as first
element of production.
Industrial economy versus cognitive economy
The cognitive approach emerges when the economy becomes to use cognitive
works based on the contamination among different skills, competence, and
capabilities.
The knowledge overcomes the limitations imposed by the time and the space
We are not working to quickly produce new knowledge, but we are working to
create new knowledge that we will use in the next future.
A radical change in perspective
The causes for the increasing relevance of knowledge are:
ü The increasing use of artificial energy.
ü The enlargement in the immaterial consumption.
ü The experiential economy.
ü The multiplier due to the knowledge sharing.
ü The ‘sendipity’, related to the opportunity to find new things different form the
things that we are searching.
The causes of the increasing relevance of knowledge
In the cognitive economy they emerge new actors.
Market relationships are more personal and individualistic.
The new economy is based on the people and not on the individuals.
A new role for human resources
ü New rules for the proprieties.
ü An active role of territories in supporting
the generation of new knowledge.
ü A different role of people in the production
and use.
ü A different conception of time.
ü An increasing flow of externality and
asymmetries due to market relationships
ü The increasing complexity of social and
economic dynamics.
The futures of knowledge society
The complexity is showed by:
ü A variety that overcome our capability to understand, classify, and manage all
the variables that affect a problems.
ü A variety that evolve faster than our capability to develop new interpretative
schemes.
ü A indeterminacy that obstacle the opportunity for forecast and plan the
evolutions of programs and actions.
The emergence of complexity