When knowledge era clients meet industrial era service providers

Patrick, at Green Chameleon, writes about the limitations of knowledge management systems, their constraining characteristics and the real world knowledge sharing practices of the medical community. There is an excellent graphic that shows the symptoms of the Industrial Era grating against the Knowledge Era. The medical field is still working in silos of specialist knowledge, where doctors and nurses learn in separate schools and from different perspectives, but about the same thing – human health.

These separate disciplines, with their mores and practices dating back in time, are now confronted with the patient who has instant access to a lot of information; not all of it accurate. Patrick notes that not all knowledge sharing is equal, but my feeling is that the informed patient is someone whom the medical system has not yet comes to grips with. If the medical profession, with all of its specialties, cannot share information with members outside the tribe, then how can information be freely shared with the patient?

Friction will continue in hierarchial corporations and bureaucracies as knowledge era clients rub against industrial era service providers. One of our challenges in the training and education fields with be to provide methods and tools to overcome these knowledge-sharing obstacles. Enabling learning flow in a networked knowledge society is much more important than creating learning content.