The Other Intelligence

Real Time KM in a Time of War

Institute for Counter-terrorism (ICT) has published a study on the role of real-time knowledge management in a theater of war, "Learning to digest during fighting – Real Time Knowledge Management."

Dumb Librarians

Recent GovExec.com article explored the challenges facing the Library of Congress:

"The overwhelming challenge facing the Library in its third century is how to superimpose the exploding world of digital knowledge and information onto the still-expanding world of books and other traditional analog materials," Librarian of Congress James Billington said in prepared testimony during a recent House Administration Committee oversight hearing.

But many of its staff will not make the transition. Bill Ayers, the Library's director for workforce acquisitions, said it offered a voluntary retirement incentive for librarians who had become "very comfortable" with traditional research and had no desire to update their skills for the digital era.

Nearly 200 employees took advantage of that incentive to retire early and the sections for which they worked made individual decisions about whether those workers needed to be replaced, he added. As a result, the number of full-time Library of Congress employees dropped by 130 between fiscal 2004 and fiscal 2005.

It's not just the Library of Congress burdened with a workforce resistant to change.  The entire federal civilian system if filled to the brim with aging workforce resistance to change, and quite frankly, to work, as well.  There's little or no incentive  to improve technology, to change out-dated business processes, or to reorganize for efficieny and relevance.  Practically unskilled for the contemporary private business environment, government workers often rely on contractors to do basic tasks -- such as power presentation development. I once worked in an environment where contractors take over day-to-day operational management, because none of the 12 government employees had the skillsets needed to do the work.

Imagine if a private company had to rely on a (mostly unfireable) workforce unwilling to adapt?  The company would sink.  Quite frankly, I don't shed a tear for the LC's dead weight. They couldn't retire fast enough.