The Social Life of Information by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid Harvard Business School Press, February 2000. ISBN: 0875847625 Contents Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: Tunneling Ahead 1
1 Limits to Information 11
2 Agents and Angels 35
3 Home Alone 63
4 Practice Makes Process 91
5 Learning -- in Theory and in Practice 117
6 Innovating Organization, Husbanding Knowledge 147
7 Reading the Background 173
8 Re-education 207
Afterword: Beyond Information 243
Notes 253
Bibliography 289
Index 307
About the Authors 319 Chapter 5: Learning -- in Theory and in Practice Knowledge management is the use of technology to make information relevant and accessible wherever that information may reside. To do this effectively requires the appropriate application of the appropriate technology for the appropriate situation. Knowledge management incorporates systematic processes of finding, selecting, organizing, and presenting information in a way that improves an employee's comprehension and use of business assets. We began the last chapter contemplating the trend from business process reengineering to knowledge management. There, we focused primarily on the limits of process, which we suggested was an info-friendly concept, but one that might be blind to other issues. In this chapter, we take up the other half of the matter and consider knowledge and learning, again in relation to practice and again as distinct from information. We do this with some trepidation. On the one hand, epistemology, the theory of knowledge, has formed the centerpiece of heavyweight philosophical arguments for millennia. On the other, knowledge management has many aspects of another lightweight fad. That enemy of lightweights, The Economist, has pronounced it no more than a buzzword. We may then, be trying to lift a gun
too