An evaluation of democracy: how it can help you to think about knowledge governance

Knowledge management is interdisciplinary! Knowledge management is cultural! Knowledge management is implicit!

These are the issues which are relevant to me when talking about knowledge management. It is a very complex discipline which should be threatened with care when developing and implementing such initiatives in businesses. Nonetheless, it is essential in a competitive and fast-changing environment to have access to the latest knowledge in order to make innovative decisions and one way to have access to it is that the holders of critical knowledge should have the abilities and skills to exchange it. Can we do this by 'just' launching a Wiki, a SharePoint application, or other social media tools? No, these are just temporary means of doing the job. On a long term, businesses should focus on a way more complex issue in order to survive on a long term and that is governance.

For a while now I am closely following the discussions about governance, and I am particularly interested in a governance model that is increasingly showing signs of failure. It is difficult to know exactly why and how, because we have been a part of that governance system for such a long time - and over time it changed in different forms. I am talking about democracy. The following video is a documentary about why it is failing and there are some issues which could be very useful when thinking about 'knowledge' governance model for businesses, because in order to dare to share, people need to have comfort in it and this comfort can, among other things, come out of being transparent. More about these issues in this video