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Pakistan Flooding/Knowledge Services: An Analysis

September 1, 2010 By Guy St. Clair

SMR’s August 26th post described the work of the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-HABITAT) in helping Pakistanis, as the flood disaster moves into the post-disaster recovery phase.

Pakistani Floods: KM/Knowledge Services at Work provides strategic knowledge managers with a dramatic example of how KM/knowledge services – as a management or functional discipline – comes into play in a critical “real-life” situation. In the quote from UN-HABITAT’s staff newsletter, we learn that assessment teams will collect information on damage and then share that information with relevant partners, who will then help support the recovery. The teams are expected to deal with such essentials as land and settlement, community preferences, reconstruction, housing types and cost, local knowledge, and availability of skills, to “build capacity for reconstruction.”

If we apply the standard definition of KM (“working with knowledge”) and move on to the three elements of knowledge services (now established as the merging of information management, KM, and strategic learning), we get a reasonable and easy-to-understand picture of what has to happen to get affected people through a crisis. In this case knowledge services precedes classical KM, for the assessment teams will have been gathering and managing information and digging into strategic learning before they start “working with” the knowledge they acquire.

And that strategic learning? Is it really the big deal the phrase implies? Not at all. In the lecture hall or the professional development workshop, we cryptically describe strategic learning as anything you learn and share that helps you do your job better. And the U.N. descriptor for this situation is even better: what we call strategic learning, these experts simply call capacity building.

So the pieces are all there, and while most situations in which strategic knowledge professionals use their skills and share their expertise are not quite so drastic as in dealing with the Pakistan flooding, the role played by KM/knowledge services is increasingly demonstrated in everything we do. And now that we recognize that role, we move on do doing it better and better as we learn from our own experiences. In doing so, we take on our own version of capacity building – this time for KM/knowledge services.

Tagged With: KD/KS, KM, knowledge development and, knowledge services, Pakistan, Pakistan - Flooding (2010), strategic knowledge management, strategic knowledge professionals

About Guy St. Clair

Guy St. Clair is the Series Editor for Knowledge Services, from Verlag Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin, the scholarly publishing house specializing in academic literature. The series subject is knowledge services, the approach to managing intellectual capital that merges information management, knowledge management (KM), and strategic learning, presenting and discussing new and innovative approaches to knowledge sharing in all fields of work.

With Barrie Levy, Guy  is the author of The Knowledge Services Handbook: A Guide for the Knowledge Strategist (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020). He is also the author of Knowledge Services: A Strategic Framework for the 21st Century Organization (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016). [Note: Go here for the free PDF version of this book: https://bit.ly/3msI27V. ]

Guy is also the author of Knowledge Services: Five Free Webinars from Guy St. Clair, available to anyone who wants to learn more about knowledge services. The webinars are offered at no charge.

Guy’s other professional writings are listed in SMR International’s corporate website, at SMRShare. 

Comments

  1. suleman says

    September 6, 2010 at 7:56 am

    I have more than 10-years’ experience in community development and KM/ MIS services in Pakistan.

    I would totally agree with you on this approach, it is the right time to implement KM in Pakistan with its full potential, because as the time would pass, with government and aid agencies working on adhoc basis or ill-planned (with no KM support) the situation would become extremely critical.

    KM is the only answer for supplying coordinated emergency, re-construction and rehabilitation in this situation.

    I hope the governments are able to handle the situation in time

    Reply

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