| 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. |