H.G. Wells on Knowledge Management. H.G. Wells recognized the need for KM as early as 1937. He advocated for a Permanent World Encyclopaedia in a speech that included this quotation:

An immense and ever-increasing wealth of knowledge is scattered about the world today; knowledge that would probably suffice to solve all the mighty difficulties of our age, but it is dispersed and unorganized. We need a sort of mental clearing house for the mind: a depot where knowledge and ideas are received, sorted, summarized, digested, clarified and compared.

~H.G. Wells
The Brain: Organization of the Modern World

[excited utterances]

The late Gordon Dickson offered a similar vision in his book The Final Encyclopedia. He offered a notion of a single repository of all human knowledge as a route to understanding what was "at the back of the human head." Actually, it's a fairly common concept in a number of good science fiction novels.

What's good in a fictional setting, however, only serves to confuse the issue when you're trying to make something practical happen in the real world. The myth that all these stories perpetuate is that the relevant problem is collecting and organizing the knowledge. As important as library science is to coping with a world of information overload and data glut, it's not the most important, or even the first, problem in knowledge management that needs to be solved.

The first problem that needs to be solved is helping knowledge workers understand how knowledge they don't already possess from experience might be relevant to solving their problem at hand. All the well-organized repositories in the world won't be relevant until an individual knowledge worker decides they need to turn somewhere else for help.

9:59:07 PM •  • comment