Worklife

Ramblings about workplace culture, life in Japan, and then some.

Knowledge Creation and IT

Apr 01, 2003 17:10 pm / 4 comments

Such widely dis­cussed sub­ject, but here’s my angle on it.

Most peo­ple real­izes that IT is not enough for knowl­edge
cre­ation. The story I use when talk­ing about their rela­tion­ship
is that IT is exten­sion of electricity.

Just by hav­ing elec­tric­ity at your home means??nothing, unless
you have tools that will con­vert the elec­tric­ity into energy
source for appli­ances such as refre­gi­ra­tor, tele­vi­sion, per­sonal
computer.  Even those by them­selves mean noth­ing if there were
no milk to refre­gi­rate, Dis­cov­ery chan­nel to watch, com­puter to
be hooked up with blog.  Mas­sive data col­lected via IT by
them­selves means noth­ing if they are not sorted in appropi­rate
way for them to become infor­ma­tion. And infor­ma­tion such as my
thoughts and expe­ri­ences on inter­net must be shared and dis­cussed
before they become knowl­edge. And they are “slow” kind of
knowl­edge at best. “Dynamic” kind of knowl­edge comes when I get
together with inter­est­ing peo­ple, that is, shar­ing our thoughts
on cre­at­ing cool and pro­duc­tive places to work, and this
dis­cus­sion tak­ing place in phys­i­cal “ba”, like Cacita in Rop­pongi.
In phys­i­cal “ba”, our senses are fully uti­lized, that is to say
pick­ing up visual cues like a smile on a face, along with smell
of lemon­grass in the air, taste of creme brulee, touch of peo­ple
gath­ered together. When we are together, some­thing hap­pens,
like all of sud­den, we come up with an idea of reg­u­larly vis­it­ing
work­place cre­ated by each other, so that we could learn from each
other to do bet­ter jobs.

“Slow” knowl­edge is impor­tant, and it is enjoy­able, like I am
enjoy­ing par­tic­i­pat­ing in blog net­work. But “Dynamic” kind of
knowl­edge is impor­tant, so nec­ces­sary for us all.

Am I going to trans­late all this into Japan­ese??? Although I
want to share this thought with my friends, that’s daunting…

 

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4 Comments

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1. nob seki said on Apr 04, 2003 18:47 pm:

It is said that “killer” appli­ca­tions are nec­es­sary to get such devices pop­u­lar as fridges and PCs. I agree on this if being pop­u­lar means being used by many peo­ple, and I really do like being at “ba” with people.

But after I read this blog entry, a cou­ple of ideas hit upon me: (1) mean­ing of “being pop­u­lar” may have been chang­ing. (2) we may need to squeeze some­thing out of things that haven’t had any good application.

(1) It is said that life of mass pro­duc­tion — mass con­sump­tion ended, which implies me that it is not so nec­es­sary to become “popluar” in the future as it’s been.

(2) maybe this is called inno­va­tion, not creation.

My Eng­lish really sucks and I should have started writ­ing this in Japan­ese.… cuz Suda-san appar­ently reads japan­ese as well.…


 
2. Fujiko Suda said on Apr 06, 2003 18:39 pm:

Thank you very much for your inter­est­ing com­ment. No, I don’t think your Eng­lish sucks. I under­stand what you are say­ing. I know at least one per­son who reads my blog can’t read Japan­ese, so your com­ment in Eng­lish is very, very helpful.

My thoughts about your com­ment (2), that era of mass con­sump­tion ended, I think that era of mass pro­duc­tion of same style ended (for instance, car used to only come in black, or office chair selec­tion was lim­ited), but mass con­sump­tion still exsists. We use more paper than ever because we casu­ally print any­thing with slight­est of excuse. Our rate of buy­ing new gad­get has increased phe­nom­i­nally over the years. Cars too. We scrap. Recy­cle only parts of products.

As for your (3), maybe, although very rarely, it could be inno­va­tion, but most of the time, it would be dis­cov­er­ing words to be able to express the thought we already had, or incre­men­tal improve­ment on some­thing which is not innovation.

Your com­ments pro­pel me for deeper dive!


 
3. Dave Oshel said on Dec 11, 2003 03:52 am:

Do you mean ?? or ?? or ?? or ?? or … ? From con­text, it seems that “ba” implies a place, whether phys­i­cal or vir­tual, where peo­ple may gather and share thoughts, feel­ings and expe­ri­ences? Like a cha­t­room or a forum, but a kind of inti­mate Japan­ese ver­sion? A tea­room with­out cer­e­mony?

This is very inter­est­ing. Like so many Japan­ese forms (anime, espe­cially), I have to let this teabag soak in my cup to get all the fla­vor out! ;-)

Maybe ?? is a kind of liv­ing poetry.


 
4. Fujiko Suda said on Dec 11, 2003 14:15 pm:

Iku­jiro Non­aka sure did ele­vate the sta­tus of some of Japan­ese words like “ba” ?? and “kata”??.????Many west­ern schol­ars and busi­ness peo­ple pon­der the mean­ing of these words asso­ci­at­ing them with knowl­edge man­age­ment. For some­one like you with deep under­stand­ing of Japan­ese cul­ture and lan­guage, it can be sim­ple and obvi­ous. There you go with another enig­matic com­ment! Every time I read you com­ment, I read your com­ment at least three times before I think I get your mean­ing, and I think about it for a moment more. I feel like the Grass Hop­per in an old 70’s TV show, Kung Fu.


 

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