| A starting point for wisdom is a humble assertion: “I (We) don’t know.” This
assertion can be the real beginning of wisdom. Wisdom can be defined very
simply as “the ability to judge soundly.” Because business transactions per se
do not inspire much wisdom in decision makers, wisdom comes from connecting
these transactions to each other and their change over time so that sound
judgments can be made. Wisdom requires an intuitive ability, born of experience,
to look beyond current situations in order to recognize exceptional factors
and anticipate unusual opportunities and outcomes. Largely untapped today,
wisdom is a vital organization resource, accumulated through experience, and
applied to everyday learning at work. Basically, wisdom is a personal capacity
acquired through creative thinking and experience. From this perspective, there
is a tendency to replace past hierarchical and functional roles with learning
relationships that focus on wisdom as the foundation of the new organization.
Today, there are a number of information systems that tell the organization’s
decision makers where they have been and, to a degree, where they are going,
but not much about “what needs to be done” to grow an organization over time
in an optimal manner. For example, knowledge management systems give decision
makers information and knowledge about an organization’s operations while
business intelligence systems analyze the results of operations, that is, give
decision makers a good understanding of an organization’s operations. More
recently, smart business systems focus on optimization of an organization’s operations
beforehand. Although all of these systems represent improvements over
time, there is need for a fundamental shift or a new paradigm in how information
systems are effectively used by decision makers. More specifically, there is a
need to employ optimal knowledge management/wisdom management systems
or simply optimal KM/WM systems which provide company decision makers
with the ability to connect “points of wisdom” about what needs to be done within
and outside the organization for optimal results over time. |
