Worklife

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

Knowledge management outsourced

Aug 09, 2003 22:55 pm / Add a comment

It’s been about a year since the last time our FM Study group got together for a good dis­cus­sion, and last night, we made up for one year blank. I think it is the chem­istry our group has, espe­cially when Oshima-san, Shimazaki-san and Yasuhara-san are all present.

We really got into hot mode when we delved into cur­rent trend among com­pa­nies (not just Japan, glob­ally, we think) in out­sourc­ing the data cen­ter. We all felt the dan­ger of out­sourc­ing the stor­age of entire explicit knowl­edge to out­side of orga­ni­za­tion, with the link left up to IT per­son who usu­ally has no clue about the sig­nif­i­cance of com­pany knowl­edge they have sole con­trol over. The thread that link a com­pany and its data cen­ter (knowl­edge galore!) is so frag­ile, should any­thing go wrong, (and you can bet it will! Remem­ber Endeaver? Enron? Bear­ing Secu­ri­ties? Mizoho Bank?) its effect on a com­pany can be fatal.

The redun­dunce of stor­age of such knowl­edge within a com­pany is left up to indi­vid­u­als, and should any­thing hap­pen to the data cen­ter, the knowl­edge will become hope­lessly fragmented.

So few of us under­stand the brick and mor­tar of IT sys­tem, and when IT peo­ple tell us some­thing has to be done in a cer­tain way, we don’t have the con­fi­dence to argue with them, like Shimazaki-san does. How do we over­come our rela­tion­ship with IT peo­ple? Develop com­mu­ni­ca­tion link, talk, I guess.

 

Possibly Related


 

Comments

You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.

 

Leave a comment



More

« | »



Page 1 of 11