Managing the connected organization
by Volker Weber
If the knowledge that you seek is not within your network horizon[1, 2, or 3 steps], then you assume it is not available in your organization and you reinvent it or pay for it on the outside. Exasperated with this network horizon in his organization, a former CEO of HP once lamented, "If we only knew what we know".
The natural response in many organizations is to throw technology at the problem. A very poor, yet quite common, solution is to mine the knowledge from employees, codify it, and store it in a knowledge database. Many large consulting firms tried this approach in the early to mid-1990s with usually poor results. They found that people were not always willing to make public their best knowledge and that codifying tacit knowledge was like trying to nail jelly to the wall.
Why not use the power of the network itself to create a solution?
