Proceedings of 8th European Assembly on telework (Telework2001)

153The possibility to access an organisation’s available database and files is a further elementthat should characterise a genuine knowledge management, although nowadays the access andbrowsing, due to the tools heaviness and contents wideness, sometimes are prohibitive. Thismethodology, that allows simple (not simplistic) search and browsing, is based on appropriatetechnological choices, but actually deriving from the old approach <strong>of</strong> the 70s mainframes’ world.The knowledge browsing tools are generally designed to provide the ‘right’ answer, but are notdesigned to consider experience. Also here it is supposed that the user encodes what he/she wantsto possibly receive the ‘right’ answer 19 .Tools that give us the right answer once we have defined the problem are not useful, or at least areonly scarcely useful. What we need are tools that help us to define a problem, tools that allow usto communicate and browse among files in order to help us defining what we need and what canbe imagined and carried out.The components <strong>of</strong> an actual knowledge management system can therefore be given as a platformfor cooperation and horizontal communication, a workflow system and a search and browsingengine based on methods that are appropriate to interpret contents. We want to repeat againthat these are only the technological systems, while a knowledge management systems must bedeveloped on the organisational texture itself, by introducing organisational models very far fromthe hierarchical paradigms. In other words, knowledge and innovation are embodied experiencesand the human beings are those who can make them true.The point <strong>of</strong> view to look from is that <strong>of</strong> the observer, who has the role <strong>of</strong> interpreting the signs.The interpretation is the generation <strong>of</strong> meanings, starting from the experiencing <strong>of</strong> the object wewant to know and carrying through one’s knowledge capacity, one’s living organisation.However, things seems to have taken rather a different route: from many sided we hear abouts<strong>of</strong>tware tools for knowledge management as if it were accountancy; or we hear speeches aboutstock management <strong>of</strong> bits <strong>of</strong> knowledge, as if this could be written on a hard-disk and transferredregardless the subject that created it in the experience phase 20 .As a matter <strong>of</strong> fact these interpretations produce technological and organisational involution,because they inhibit the development <strong>of</strong> the organisation showing how much unreasonable andharmful in terms <strong>of</strong> efficacy they are. Any tool that encapsulate information and re-proposes itas knowledge, tends to give an idea <strong>of</strong> knowledge as something that homologates us all the sameand leaves outside all that, on the contrary, distinguishes the individualities and the cooperationnetworks 21 .We want to be nasty: sometimes knowledge management seems to work hard to the further dulling<strong>of</strong> organisations.«… if our desires do not change, nothing changes in fact because we go on living through it thesame confi guration <strong>of</strong> action (<strong>of</strong> emotioning) that we used to live.» 2219 Generically it resolves into a list <strong>of</strong> documents organized with a variously generated rating20 Laurence Prusak (IBM), not being a particularly ascetic theorist, also speaks in a similar way.21 Mutually co-defi ned.22 Humberto R. Maturana, «Metadesign», in V.V. A.A., Technomorphica, V2_Organizatie, 1997