One Company – Two Outcomes:
Knowledge Integration vs Corporate Disintegration in the Absence of Knowledge Management.
For our meeting in August, long-term KMLF member Bill Hall will speak to us on the topic of a paper he has written with Dr Susu Nousala and Bill Kilpatrick, which is currently in press for the KM journal VINE. This study identifies specific factors that caused a successful organisation to disintegrate.
When: Wednesday August 26, 6:00 – 8:00pm
Where: RMIT Graduate School of Business, 300 Queen Street. Melbourne – Lecture room 158.1.2c (Ground level – just behind reception).
RSVP: melbournekmlf@gmail.com
Ample metered street parking nearby in Queen Street (between La Trobe and Little Lonsdale).
Agenda
6:00-6:30 Networking with other thinking collaborators (over drinks and nibbles).
6:30-7:15 Bill Hall – Knowledge Integration or Corporate Disintegration
7:15-8:00 Informal conversation amongst the group to explore the ideas and concepts.
More information
The abstract of Bill’s paper begins with:
To learn to avoid pitfalls we need to accept and understand failures. This anonymous case study reports on the disintegration of a billion-dollar engineering project management company due to the absence of effective knowledge management, where both the reasons for and organisational consequences of the failure are fairly clear.
Within a theoretical framework… this case study compares knowledge management styles from two eras in the company’s history: (1) as it grew from an acquired site with a single project to a multi-divisional leader in its regional market, and then (2) as it failed in its original line of business to the point where it divested most of its assets.
The case study highlights a change from permissive management, allowing project teams to work out local solutions for business problems as they arose, to strengthened hierarchical command and control that stifled knowledge sharing and solution development at the work face. Few studies so clearly highlight the critical importance of personal knowledge and its sharing in knowledge intensive organisations for maintaining successful operations.
About Bill
William (Bill) Hall is a retired Documentation and Knowledge Management Systems Analyst. He currently resides in the Engineering Learning Unit of the Melbourne School of Engineering as a Senior Research (Honorary). He earned his PhD in Evolutionary Biology from Harvard University in 1973, and migrated to Australia in late 1980. He has built on his interest in computers and expertise in producing academic and technical documentation to work in areas of computer literacy education, small business system software development, and banking information technology and systems.
From 1990 until “retiring” in mid 2007, Bill worked in the defence industry in various content management and KM systems analysis and design roles. In late 2000 for an as yet unfinished book, Bill began to study the co-evolution of human cognition and the cognitive tools humans use to extend their cognition. Since 1998, Bill has published practical works in the area of (mostly) engineering content and knowledge management and theoretical works on the associations of knowledge in the emergence of “living” organizations that can be found on his web-site, “Evolutionary Biology of Species and Organizations” – http://www.orgs-evolution-knowledge.net. Since returning to academia, Bill has been advising PhD students and guest lecturing on engineering Knowledge Management.