Slide 2 of 12
Notes:
The future for our profession lies in our ability to integrate our activities with those which are critical to economic performance in our countries. We will only survive whilst we are providing added value to our organisations. This is where my sub heading of development and atrophy appears. We have to focus on the serious business of knowledge management, a term which is currently being coined in connection with the intellectual capital of organisations. I refer to another report about to appear, Creating the Knowledge Based Business, from a research firm, Business Intelligence. An insurance firm, SKANDIA, has taken a lead in identifying a model of managing intellectual capital which in part depends on managing the human capital, structural capital and customer capital components of its structure. This initiative depends on firms being able to assert ownership of what its employees know, and what they know is in part dependent on their ability to access and use information and turn it into unable knowledge, used to the benefit of the firms they work for.
The need for people to use information is self evident in this model, but what is not so readily available is the opportunity to obtain and thus to benefit from the skills of information exploration from finding to exploitation via analysis. Universities for all is not an unattainable cliché, but it will need an expansion of our current definitions, our abilities to present learning through technology and the creation of what I believe to be at the heart of our conference, an educated INFORMATION SOCIETY
