Knowledge management

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Knowledge management (KM) is the management of knowledge within organizations.

Definition

A widely accepted 'working definition' of knowledge management applied in worldwide organizations is available from the WWW Virtual Library on Knowledge Management:

"Knowledge Management caters to the critical issues of organizational adaptation, survival, and competence in face of increasingly discontinuous environmental change.... Essentially, it embodies organizational processes that seek synergistic combination of data and information processing capacity of information technologies, and the creative and innovative capacity of human beings."

In simpler terms, Knowledge Management seeks to make the best use of the knowledge that is available to an organization, creating new knowledge in the process.

It is helpful to make a clear distinction between knowledge on the one hand, and information and data on the other.

Information can be considered as a message. It typically has a sender and a receiver. Information is the sort of stuff that can, at least potentially, be saved onto a computer. Data is a type of information that is structured, but has not been interpreted.

Knowledge might be described as information that has a use or purpose. Whereas information can be placed onto a computer, knowledge exists in the heads of people. Knowledge is information to which an intent has been attached.

First and second generation Knowledge Management

By the early nineties, it was clear that there were two distinct branches of Knowledge Management.

First generation Knowledge Management

First generation Knowledge Management involves the capture of information and experience so that it is easily accessible in a corporate environment. An alternate term is "knowledge capture". Managing this capture allows the system to grow into a powerful information asset.

This first branch had its roots firmly in the use of technology. In this view Knowledge Management is an issue of information storage and retrieval. It uses ideas derived from systems analysis and management theory. This approach led to a boom in consultancies and in the development of so-called knowledge technologies. Typically first-generation Knowledge Management involved developing sophisticated data analysis and retrieval systems with little thought to how the information they contained would be developed or used. This led to organisations investing heavily in technological fixes that had either little impact or a negative impact on the way in which knowledge was used.

A typical scenario might have seen an organisation install a sophisticated intranet in order to categorize and disseminate information, only to find that the extra work involved in setting up the metadata meant that few within the organisation actually used the intranet. This occasionally led to management mandating the use of the intranet, resulting in resentment amongst staff, and undermining their trust in the organisation. Thus first generation solutions are often counterproductive.

Management theory functions as a branch of economics, and to a large extent it adopts econometric standards. When it became apparent that it would be useful to be able to manage knowledge, it was natural for managers to attempt to apply their preferred econometric methods to the cause. But econometrics is about commodities and cash flow. It found it therefore necessary to treat knowledge as if it were a commodity.

This, of course, was a surprisingly difficult thing to do, essentially because knowledge is not a commodity but a process. But a suitable epistemology was found, in the form of that developed by Michael Polanyi. Polanyi’s epistemology objectified the cognitive component of knowledge – learning and doing – by labelling it tacit knowledge and for the most part removing it from the public view. Learning and doing became a 'black box' that was not really subject to management; the best that could be done was to make tacit knowledge explicit.

Its failure to provide any theoretical understanding of how organisations learn new things and how they act on this information meant that first generation Knowledge Management was incapable of managing knowledge creation.

Second Generation Knowledge Management

Faced with the theoretical and practical failure of first generation techniques to live up to their promise, theorists began to look more closely at the ways in which knowledge is created and shared.

Along with this realisation came a change in metaphor. Organisations came to be seen as capable of learning, and so a link grew between learning theory and management.

At the same time hierarchical models of organisational structure were replaced by more organic models, which see effective organisations as capable of structural change in response to their environment.

The advent of complexity theory and chaos theory provided more metaphors that enable managers to replace models of organisations as integrated systems with models of organisations as complex interdependent entities that are capable of responding to their environment.

Second generation Knowledge Management gives priority to the way in which people construct and use knowledge. It derives its ideas from complex systems, often making use of organic metaphors to describe knowledge growth. It is closely related to organizational learning. It recognises that learning and doing are more important to organisational success than dissemination and imitation.

See also

• Content management
• community of practice
• Document management
• e-learning
• Expert system
• knowledge
• Knowledge base
• Knowledge representation
• knowledge transfer
• Knowledge visualization
• management
• Semantic Web
• organizational learning

Finding related topics

• list of information technology management topics
• list of management topics
• list of computing topics
• list of marketing topics
• list of Internet topics
• list of economics topics
• list of finance topics
• list of accounting topics
• list of human resource management topics
• list of business law topics
• list of production topics
• list of business ethics, political economy, and philosophy of business topics
• list of business theorists
• list of economists
• list of corporate leaders
• list of companies

References

• Enabling Knowledge Creation: New Tools for Unlocking the Mysteries of Tacit Understanding by Ikujiro Nonaka, Georg Von Krogh, and Kazuo Ichijo, Oxford University Press, 2000, hardcover, 304 pages, ISBN 0195126165
• Bernbom, Gerald, editor. (2001). Information Alchemy: The Art and Science of Knowledge Management. EDUCAUSE Leadership Series #3. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Graham, Ricci. (2001).
• Graham, Ricci. (2001). "Benchmarking Jackson State." Knowledge Management, (4): 5. p. 11. May, 2001.
• A. Tiwana, The Knowledge Management Toolkit: Orchestrating IT, Strategy, and Knowledge Platforms (2nd Edition), Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2002.
• Ward, Lewis. (2001). "Collaborative KM Tools: Putting Customer Care Online." Knowledge Management (4):4. pp. CS1-CS6. Special Advertising Section.
• Leibold, M. Probst, G. and Gibbert, M. (2001) Strategic Management in the Knowledge Economy, Wiley, Erlangen 2001.
• Probst, G. Raub, S. and Romhardt K. (1999) Managing Knowledge, Wiley, London, 1999 (Exists also in other languages).

External links

• Know-Center Graz Austria's Competence Center for Knowledge Management
• I-Know - International Conference on Knowledge Management Europe's largest International Conference on Knowledge Management
• Wissensmanagement Impulse Online-Journal on Knowledge Management (German)
• Wissensmanagement Forum Graz Knowledge Management Forum Graz
• KnowledgeCheck - Online Assessment Tool
• KnowledgeBoard;
• Geneva Knowledge Group;
• Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education;
• The Knowledge Management Network™
• Research on KM by the IMU unit;
• What is Knowledge Management?
• Knowledge in Action: Seminal Contributions to Practice and Research
• KM projects (DFKI GmbH)
• Knowledge Management for Higher Education. ERIC Digest.
• Knowledge Management in Instructional Design. ERIC Digest.
• "The nonsense of 'knowledge management'", a paper by T.D. Wilson that criticizes knowledge management for being an "umbrella term for a variety of organizational activities, none of which are concerned with the management of knowledge."
• PNAS supplement: Mapping Knowledge Domains

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