Tuesday 30 November 2010


Knowledge management and Japanese football



Japanese Fans
Originally uploaded by StewieD
Here's an interesting article.

It's about Akihiro Nishimura, the Youth Development Technical Director for the Japanese Football Association (that's "soccer", for our American friends), and his plans to use Knowledge Management to support the development of world class football in Japan.

When I started reading this, i thought "I bet he's really talking about Information Management", but he isn't. As he says in the article
“Japan is facing problems in these three areas – understanding other languages and cultures as well as its standard of football against world standards. The solution is our ‘Knowledge Management’ concept, which aims to translate ‘tacit knowledge’ into ‘explicit knowledge’ and covert ‘individual knowledge’ into ‘organisational knowledge’,” he said.
It will be interesting to see how he does it, but there is absolutely no reason why you cannot look at the tacit cultural knowledge from nations such as Brazil or Spain, where football is woven into national life at all levels and has become so tacit as to be instinctual, and draw out the implications for Japan. We can see some of Nishamura's plans from this quote
Nishimura also revealed that Japan’s development plans are based on world standards, even that of competitions that its national teams were not involved in. “We use world competitions as our standard and then we will analyse them, identify problems, create hypothetical scenarios and then try to solve the problems. And we implement this cycle not just for the national teams. We have a system to make this cycle nationwide,” said the former national player.
We wish him luck, though not TOO much luck when Japan plans England in the next world cup!

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