Some thoughts on knowledge management
Some thoughts on knowledge management that I want to share with you.
Here’s a post by Nick Milton worth reading that talks about what has to be in place to preserve corporate knowledge.
Also take a look at this post by Gil Yehuda on knowledge management in pharmaceutical industry. Yehuda mentions in his post that knowledge management should not be seen as a document management or library service. He gets it right when he says, “Its value is only realized when applied to current and future needs. Data and documents describe what was. Insight is needed to understand what is. ………….Knowledge thrives in the interpretation of facts and signals, not just in its collection.”
As I see it, the approach of Knowledge Management in the Pharma R&D environment remains principally focused on the simple management of tacit employee knowledge versus placing effort behind creating a holistic organizational ‘capability’ approach. Generally the attempt is to manage this knowledge is via documents versus the attempt to capture the knowledge and then apply the knowledge to different situations/applications.
I continue to be surprised at the level of wasted effort I see in drug development projects. Some of it is the result of the “not invented here syndrome.” While other times it is a matter that the knowledge is locked up (intentionally or unintentionally).
Much has been and continues to be made of the notion of “intellectual capital” in the life sciences. Yet from what I am able to glean through my reading and direct work in the pharmaceutical industry, not enough effort has been applied to operationalize these ideas in terms of pharmaceutical innovation and drug development.
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