1. On the Human Dimension of Knowledge Management
“Someday, maybe we’ll see more companies searching not for managers and employees, but for
impresarios and wizards.”
John Scully (1939-)
Odyssey: Pepsi to Apple (1987)
People perform knowledge work. People use technology and processes to create, manage, and use
content to accomplish organizational goals. Consequently, people are central to knowledge management
in the DRDC. As pointed out by Harris, (1993): “The most visible differences between the corporation of
the future and its present-day counterpart will be not the products they make or the equipment they use –
but who will be working, how they will be working, why they will be working and what work will mean
to them.” Tapscott (1996) considers the worker’s perspective: “In the old economy, workers tried to
achieve fulfilment through leisure. The worker was alienated from the means of production that were
owned and controlled by someone else. In the new economy, fulfilment can be achieved through work
and the means of production shifts to the brain of the producer.”
There are two inseparable aspects of the human dimension of DRDC’s infrastructure. The social aspect
focuses on individual behavior, community dynamics, and organizational culture. This follows the
individual, group, and organizational learning framework of Crossman et. al (1999), but is used here in a
much broader context. Human resource management involves: staffing, supervision, and retention.
Some elements of the human dimension are controlled by legally binding collective agreements, others
are constrained by government policies, and some are guided by frameworks of best practices.
1. Individuals
Knowledge workers are discussed from four perspectives: the nature of knowledge work, as human
capital, human nature, and how people interact with computers. Managing knowledge workers is
considered from staffing, supervision, and retention perspectives.
Nature of work - Knowledge workers think for a living. This is different from the industrial era, where
workers primarily used their hands or bureaucrats performed highly structured work. Thus, the nature of
work and those who do it will change in very important ways. This has been described by a number of
authors. For example, Strassman (1985) points out that: “The information worker in the large, supply-
oriented organization will be a specialist. The information worker in a small, demand oriented
specialized organization will be a generalist.” Nonaka (1998) observes that: “Inventing new knowledge
is not a specialized activity... It is a way of behaving, indeed, a way of being, in which everyone is a
knowledge worker. Drucker (1999) states that: “Productivity of the knowledge worker is not - at least
primarily - a matter of quantity of output. Quality is at least as important.” Dinnocenzo and Swegan
(2001) focus on the impact of accelerating change: “A dichotomy often exists between organizational
needs and expectations in the age of technology, and the struggle for balance and sanity at an individual
level. Individuals are being pushed to move at a faster pace by their organizations – and the organization
continues to raise it’s expectations as new productivity tools are developed.”
Human capital - Human capital is an economist’s way of factoring people into their economic models. In
this paradigm, people are seen as one factor of production, along with land, equipment, and capital. The
literature uses analogies between knowledge workers and the well-understood traditional view to explain
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2. the new paradigm. Stewart (1997) states that: “Human capital grows two ways: when the organization
uses more of what people know, and when people know more stuff that is useful to the organization.”
Davenport and Prusak (1998) point out the gap between traditional and new approaches to knowledge
workers: “Despite the corporate mantra that employee knowledge is a valuable resource, most firms do
not make concerted efforts to cultivate the knowledge-oriented activities of their personnel.” Drucker
(1998) explains the fundamental reorientation between workers and management: “In the information-
based organization, the knowledge will be primarily at the bottom, in the minds of the specialists who do
different work and direct themselves. Similarly, Ruggles and Holtshouse (1999) indicate that: “In
knowledge work, the means of production is now owned by the knowledge worker. They are volatile and
can work anywhere... Consequently, they must be managed as volunteers, not as employees.”
Human nature - The human capital approach downplays a key aspect of knowledge work. Unlike
machines and bureaucratic processes, an organization cannot control what is in peoples heads, how it gets
there, or how it is used to crate and use knowledge. Further, knowledge workers are not readily
interchangeable with each other; each has unique knowledge and abilities. Equally important, people are
social animals; their place in a social context and the nature of their interactions with others is very
important. For example, Handy (1995) observes that: “People who think of themselves as members have
more of an interest in the future of the business and its growth than those who are only its hired help.”
Tapscott (1996) extends this idea with: “It is only when workers identify with the goals of the
organization and trust it’s managers to act in mutual self-interest that effective knowledge work can be
performed.” Rihs (2000) explains: “For your people to be innovative and motivated, you need to
consider human needs. If you feel good and appreciated, you are much more open to many things than if
you always need to defend yourself.” Finally. Holmes (2001), takes a Machiavellian approach: “There
are employees who have a natural tendency to hoard information and look suspiciously on and discredit
data that others have developed. To many, entering what they know into a computer system and passing
it on to someone in another department is not only threatening, it’s a pain in the neck.”
People and computers - In today’s fast-paced and complex world, computers are an essential tool for
knowledge work. However, productive knowledge work will require human-centric design, not the other
way around. For example, Strassman (1985) notes that on one hand, “High-performance people will
extract from electronic systems levels of performance that the designers might have considered
unfeasible.” In contrast, he continues with: “Technology is inexpensive and is getting more so. The
people using it cost the most money.” Burton (1996) comments on the importance of the human mind
even in performing seemingly routine tasks: “Payable clerks are blessed with intuition, memory
recognition and the ability to make educated guesses. Computers are dumb and dumber in these areas.”
In contrast, Haddrill (1997) points out that: “The amount of time you use a computer is almost inversely
proportional to how high up you are in a company.”
2. Communities
Communities are as old as civilization. Prehistorically, groups gathered around a fire to share stories. In
ancient Rome, groups of craftsmen shared social and professional interests. In the middle ages, guilds
fulfilled a similar role throughout Europe. Although such groups lost their influence during the industrial
revolution, professional interactions continued through formal arrangements (associations, committees,
work groups) while social interactions continued through informal arrangements (informal networks,
clubs, cliques). Wenger, et. al. (2002) define modern-day communities of practice as “groups of people
who share a concern, a set of problems, or a passion about a topic and who deepen their knowledge and
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3. expertise in this area by interacting on an ongoing basis. They continue with “it is not communities of
practice themselves that are new, but the need for organizations to become more intentional and
systematic about managing knowledge, and therefore to give these age-old structures a new, central role
in the business.”
The emerging literature can be grouped into four categories - connectivity, societal impacts, design
principles, and function.
Connectivity - Communities of practice are a consequence of the communication networks provided by
the Internet. Cooper (1996) notes: “The real advantage of making it possible for everybody to
communicate online isn’t cheaper and more efficient communications – the mechanical-age viewpoint.
Instead, it is the creation of virtual communities – the information age advantage that was revealed only
after it materialized in our grasp.” Similarly, Armstrong and Hagel (1996) observe: “The notion of
community has been at the heart of the Internet since its inception... Scientists formed interactive
research communities that existed not on a physical campus but on the Internet.” Hoffert (2000) used a
transportation metaphor: “Connected communities, our living and working places for the twenty-first
century, are established by new information routes, which are consequences of the digital revolution.
They are beginning to replace the urban, suburban, and rural communities that were enabled by
automobile, railway, and airline routes – consequences of the industrial revolution.” He also used a
meeting place approach: “Networks have become social halls, and they are occupied by virtual
communities that require no physical space, do not encroach on each other, and never go to war because
they outgrow their resources.”
Societal Impacts - Negroponte (1996) predicts that no less than societal infrastructure could be affected:
“As we interconnect ourselves, many of the values of a nation-state will give way to those of both larger
and smaller electronic communities. We will socialize in digital neighborhoods in which physical space
will be irrelevant and time will play a different role.” Holmes (2001) predicted a significant increase in
in citizen involvement in governance: “Citizens connected to the web are by far the most conversant with
the issues confronting the digital age, much more than politicians, who still largely “don’t get it.”
Design principles - Establishing communities of practice is very different from most other management
processes. Boyett and Boyett (2001) state that “Communities of practice...are critical for knowledge
creation and sharing. Managers cannot create or direct communities of practice, but they can encourage
their growth. Wenger et.al. (2002) provide seven principles to guide the development of communities of
practice that are “alive,” that is natural, spontaneous, and self-directed.
• Design for evolution - Because communities are organic, designing them is more a matter of
catalyzing evolution rather than imposing a structure. They should build on preexisting networks
and evolve as members and interests change.
• Open dialogue between inside and outside - Good community design requires an internal
understanding of the communities potential to develop and steward knowledge as well as an
external perspective to help members visualize broader possibilities.
• Invite different levels of participation - People have different levels of interest in a community
and will participate to varying degrees - as core, active, and peripheral members, with their level
of involvement changing over time.
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4. • Establish both public and private spaces.- The public space provides tangible experience of
participation, demonstrates the community’s level of sophistication, and influences the
organization. The private space creates conduits for sharing information in more limited ways.
• Focus on value - Value may come from solving members problems, creating a body of
knowledge, individuals sharing insights, or solving group problems.
• Combine familiarity and excitement - As communities mature, they tend to settle into routine
activities that provide a level of comfort, a neutral place that invites candid discussions.
However, vibrant communities also need occasional infusions of divergent thinking and activity
to provide novelty and excitement to compliment the familiarity of every day activities.
• Create a community rhythm - The ebb and flow of activities such as meetings, teleconferences,
Web sites, and lunches provide a sense of movement and liveliness. If it is too fast, members
become overwhelmed and stop participation; if it is too slow, the community becomes sluggish.
Function - How successful communities function is beginning to be understood. For example,
Armstrong and Hegel (1996) note that: “A community full of half-empty rooms offers visitors a very
unsatisfactory experience. The value of participating in a community lies in users’ ability to access a
broad range of people and resources quickly and easily. Baer (1999) focuses on a key reason for
participation: “When you’re a member of a community of practice, you need to know what other
members of the community know, not to get one up on them, but rather to invoke their knowing –
because none of us have the skills or the time to be expert at everything. Ruggles and Holtshouse (1999)
focuses on community interactions: “Inside a community, ideas are validated by the shared practice or
paradigm of that community. Taking an idea outside the community requires the testing not just of the
idea, but of the paradigm itself. Negotiations between communities, therefore, make knowledge more
robust and force us to understand the barriers to knowledge sharing.
Plunkett and Attner (1983) explain that informal communities exist because they serve one or more
functions: 1) maintain the social and cultural values that group members hold in common, 2) provide an
opportunity for status, social interaction, and fulfillment, 3) provide information, and 4) influence the
work environment. Individual beliefs and characteristics, such as age, experience, personality, proximity,
interaction, race, sex, religion, and language can also lead to the formation of communities. They may
also cross organizational levels to provide subordinates with access to a friendly ear at a higher level, and
provide superiors with direct communication and access to information from lower levels. Informal
communities provide a system of checks and balances that can facilitate or retard organizational plans.
Two characteristics of informal communities are norms and cohesion. Norms are standards of behavior
that are accepted by all group members. They may influence conduct, work practices, communication
outside the group, and productivity. Failure to adhere to community norms may result in verbal
reminders that can escalate to warnings and sanctions. Cohesion is the degree to which members share a
group’s goals. The greater the cohesion, the greater the control and the greater the group’s success in
achieving its goals.
Informal communities can have both positive and negative effects on an organization. Positive impacts
include: Increase total effectiveness by supporting the organization, support management by providing
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5. advice and encouraging cooperation, provide stability by creating a feeling of acceptance and belonging,
provide a useful communication channel, and encourage better management by fostering openness.
Negative impacts include: resistance to change to protect its values and beliefs, conflict between the
formal and informal organizations, create and process false information or rumors, and pressure to
conform.
3. Culture
An organization’s culture consists of the behavior and norms that stem from the shared attitudes,
assumptions, values, and beliefs of its people (Eagen, 1994). Changing an organization’s culture from
controlling information for empowering individuals to sharing information for empowering the
organization is key to implementing knowledge management. As Argyris and Schon (1974) point out,
however, there may be a difference between stated organizational values and actual practice. Employees
will readily detect a difference between promoting knowledge sharing and rewarding individuals who
hoard knowledge. Providing no resources to support purported values leads to a conclusion that the
values are not really supported by senior management. The literature can be classified into three topics:
the role of culture, the importance of culture to the knowledge agenda, and culture change .
Role of culture - Culture is fundamental to all forms social structure, including organizations. Morgan
(1986) notes that: “When we talk about culture, we are typically referring to the pattern of development
reflected in a society’s system of knowledge, ideology, values, laws, and day-to-day ritual.... we are thus
using an old agricultural metaphor to guide our attention to very specific aspects of social development.”
Taylor (1996) observes: “What has been done, thought, written, or spoken is not culture; culture is only
that fraction that is remembered.” Gershenfeld similarly notes that: “Handling the constant arrival of
new bits will keep us from ever managing the old bits properly. Loss of cultural memory becomes the
price of staying current.”
Knowledge agenda - It is generally understood that changing an organization’s culture is a prerequisite to
long-term success of knowledge management. For example, Davenport and Prusak (1998) state:
“Values, norms, and behaviors that make up a company’s culture are the principle determinants of how
successfully important knowledge is transferred. Hamel and Prahalad (1994) put it somewhat more
graphically: “Any company that fails to reengineer its genetic coding periodically will be as much at the
mercy of environmental upheaval as tyrannosaurus rex. Holmes (2001) presented a similar argument for
the public sector: “Cultural resistance is the greatest obstacle to integrated online public services. There
will be employees who resent the intrusion of new technology in their daily routine and cling to the old,
familiar ways no matter how well processes are improved.”
Culture change - Perhaps the greatest challenge to implementing knowledge management is the need to
change long-standing, deeply entrenched, vertically oriented bureaucracies to dynamic, learning,
adaptive, and horizontally-oriented structures. As noted by Allaire (1992) “The hardest stuff is the soft
stuff - values, personal style, ways of interacting. We are trying to change the total culture of the
company. When you talk about it in general terms, everybody is all for it. But... in terms of individuals,
it is much tougher. And yet, if individuals don’t change, nothing changes. Hamel and Prahalad (1994)
state: “To create a social architecture senior management must have a point of view on what values
should predominate, what behaviors should be encouraged, and what kind of people should feel
comfortable working in the company.”
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6. 4. Human Resource Management
Much of human resource management is controlled by federal laws, regulations, and policies. However,
our interest here is not with administrative matters, such as pay and benefits, competitions, or collective
agreements. Rather, this section emphasizes how HR choices and decisions that are within the
prerogative of DRDC strongly affect the knowledge agenda. There are three broad considerations:
staffing, supervision, and retention
Staffing - Knowledge workers need different capacities and abilities than industrial-era workers or
bureaucrats. However, DRDC does not need to invent appropriate capacity and ability criteria; they are
well understood in fields such as science, engineering, and the law. For example, Ramo (1969) focused
on similarity of reasoning ability rather than domain specific knowledge when he stated: “The kinds of
individuals capable of analysing and predicting the actions of a complex, multiparameter system are
much the same as those who are capable of improving our understanding of the basic laws of nature.”
More generally, he continued with: “People skilled in thinking precisely about imprecise quantities are
needed.” Scully and Byrne (1987) were somewhat more whimsical in predicting: “Someday, maybe
we’ll see more companies searching not for managers and employees, but for impresarios and wizards.”
Pfeffer (1998) used a more business-like approach: “A company’s ability to generate those exceptional
returns in a knowledge-based economy is dependent, in large measure, upon its ability to attract, retain,
and develop the right work force – and whether it succeeds in unleashing their mental capacities.”
Supervision - As with staffing, science, engineering, and the law provide rich models for managing
knowledge workers. For example, Whiteside quipped: “Nobody’s dumb at IBM...but it’s like herding
cats - they just all have their own agenda.” Similarly, Tapscott (1996) observed that: “Anyone
responsible for managing knowledge workers knows they cannot be “managed” in the traditional sense.
Often they have specialized knowledge and skills that cannot be matched or even understood by
management.” Yet, Ruggles and Holtshouse (1999) described the gap that often exists between what is
needed and what exists: “Every company’s annual report says “Our people are our greatest asset,.” but
few companies are managed as if they believed it. More to the point, von Krogh et. al. (2000) stated:
“Knowledge workers cannot be bullied into creativity or information sharing; and the traditional forms of
compensation and organizational hierarchy do not motivate people sufficiently for them to develop the
strong relationships required for knowledge creation on a continuing basis.”
Retention - For decades, the paradigm of business and government has been to cut back staff through
attrition, lay-offs, or early retirement. This reflected both necessary and imaginary drivers, such as
reduced budgets, a desire to “clean out deadwood,” enable hiring younger employees with fresh ideas, or
simply a bureaucratic approach of throwing away what was done in the past to claim credit for something
new (which flies in the face of reusing, leveraging, or repurposing what already exists). Delong (2004)
indicates that company after company has come to recognize the short-sightedness of this approach.
Managers and professionals have considerable experiential knowledge, only some of which is formally
documented and shared. “Often, the only way their successors discover that they are missing key
insights that their predecessors had is through mistakes, unexpected quality problems, or other costly
disruptions in performance.” Now that the problem has been recognized, however, the shifting
marketplace for knowledge workers makes it increasingly difficult to retain knowledge and experience.
For example, Handy (1995) notes that: “If laborers are worthy of their hire, there is no reason to suppose
that they won’t go where the hire looks better. The assets of the new information-based corporations are,
as a result, increasingly fragile. Similarly, Sheen (1996) observes: “They look at their fathers and say,
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7. ‘Dad didn’t get the gold watch.’ So these young people say ‘I’m going to be a craftsman. And this is my
craft, the computer and technology. Armed with this, I can go anywhere.” From an DRDC perspective,
the private sector is, perhaps a decade ahead of the public sector in recognizing the extent of the problem
partially because the public sector lacks the clear, immediate indicators that a problem exists.
.
Knowledge work emphasizes new dimension of employment. If DRDC would become a knowledge
organization, it will have to encourage, promote, motivate, and reward those behaviors that support a
knowledge organization.
“Sometime soon...managers will come to realize there are not enough skilled younger workers entering
the labor force to replace the older ones leaving through retirement. When that happens, they will likely
do a rapid about face–from encouraging early retirement to discouraging it.”
David W. DeLong (1956-)
Lost Knowledge (2004) p75
Al Simard
April 13, 2010
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