The Human Element of the Knowledge Worker

Abstract

The goal of Knowledge Management (KM) is a practical one: to improve organizational capabilities through better use of the organization’s individual and collective knowledge resources. Astonishingly, despite the now-solid consensus on the importance of knowledge or intellectual capital to every organization’s success, most organizations actually manage knowledge very badly. Very few have clearly defined management roles, such as Chief Knowledge Officer (CKO), or organizational structures for the management of knowledge as a resource. Thus, the paramount protection of knowledge is not the type of knowledge itself, but the human element of the knowledge worker within knowledge management. In so doing, this chapter covers the human element of the Knowledge Worker (KW), the Learning Organization (LO) (organizations that are good at Organizational Learning [OL]), the history and meaning of knowledge, types of knowledge, and concludes with the protection of the human element of the KW.