Knowledge Management in Practice: Connections and Context

Knowledge and management: two of the most emotionally charged and highly regarded words in the contemporary English language. For good or ill they are also the name of a relatively recent development in the general practice of management. Unless carefully defined these words may encompass and promise too much; and, as an unfortunate consequence make this potentially, highly practical specialty a much too easy object for derision, misinterpretation and exaggerated claims. Librarians who are too often preoccupied with defining or redefining their identities have regrettably contributed to the confusion regarding the scope, boundaries and potential benefits of knowledge management (KM). The reasons are perhaps not difficult to identify: librarians are pre‐eminent information managers; and the distinctions between information and KM are not easy to fix (I shall avoid the traditional, tedious parsing of the differences between data, information, knowledge, etc.). It is sufficient to note that knowledge resides in the heads of individuals, hence, cannot be managed. One can, at best, seek to manage the environment in which knowledge (or information) is exchanged and exploited. If we agree on this simple premise, then it is clear that KM must legitimately be the province of general managers. This is not to deny that librarians have a significant and important role to play, but it does help us to identify which of the hyperbolic claims made by some librarians are not worth entertaining.

For example: a number of cataloguing and metadata workshops held in recent years have been pretentiously titled, “Knowledge management workshops”. Some prestigious organisations have, without making any significant changes to their responsibilities, changed the titles of their librarians from the already affected, information specialist, to knowledge manager or in one prominent case, to, librarian and KM specialist. In addition, some of these organisations have, with the addition of some minor capabilities to their OPACs, apotheosised them to KM systems.

Contributing to the problem and confusion is the relatively inchoate nature of KM. KM is a field that was developed as a result of pioneering work of Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995), Arthur Andersen, Xerox PARC, etc. KM consists of a number of distinct threads: knowledge mapping (creating and maintaining records of where knowledge and information reside within an organisation and how various aspects of knowledge and information are related); benchmarking (recording and discovering an organisation's or an industry's best practices); management of intellectual assets (patents, trade‐marks, copyrights, etc.); competitive intelligence (discovery of trends and best practices of competing organisations or of an industry from publicly available sources); knowledge engineering (the capture of expertise in the form of rules that can be applied by computer systems), etc.

KM received a great deal of attention and prominence in the early 1990s when organisations, as a consequence of overly ambitious business process re‐engineering programmes (efforts to streamline and downsize), discovered that they were losing their most valuable assets – the knowledge and experience of the staff that were leaving. This brought into stark relief something that management theorists such as Peter Drucker had long been saying and writing: organisations can easily increase short‐term profits by reducing personnel expenses, but wise investments in human resources are keys to long‐term competitiveness and success. KM promises to enhance, and derive benefit from, an organisation's intellectual assets.

The first to embrace the ideas and principles of knowledge were the major consulting firms such as Arthur Andersen, Coopers and Lybrand, Peat Marwick Mitchell, etc. They understood that they are in the knowledge business. There were also a few other pioneering organisations such as Buckman Laboratories, Hewlett Packard, Texas Instruments, General Electric, etc. that were also early, enthusiastic adopters.

Libraries and educational institutions are also very much in the knowledge business. Hence, they should be eminently able to benefit from the techniques, practices and principles of KM. That they have not done so is not for want of evangelists and disquisitions on the subject. Srikantaiah and Koenig have compiled a collection of essays on KM. These essays, some written by the editors, are of varying quality – and some could have, with little loss, been eliminated.

Regrettably, too much attention seems to be paid in some of these essays to proving the efficacy of KM with specious arguments. Some essays are littered with the argot of KM without adequate definitions. In some, terminology seems to be employed with careless abandon. For example, early in the text one encounters:

[…] Explicit knowledge deals with codified knowledge that is documented and is in the domain of structural capital […] (p. 21).

One can make an argument for the technical accuracy of this statement, but it is difficult to justify such a convoluted, pretentious definition of a very simple concept – particularly when the definition contains a term, structural capital, which itself needs careful definition to be meaningful.

Trivia is at times treated with ponderous solemnity, which seems to be supported with a liberal use of adverbs. For example:

[…] Understanding the problem completely and with clarity is absolutely essential. In order to achieve this, a system study is recommended. Assessing user requirements and determining costs and benefits is part of a systems study and is extremely helpful in designing a content management system (CMS) (p. 25).

[…] First the advancement of technology requires that projects manage knowledge in professional, industrial, regulatory, market, and customer areas. Second, the explosive nature of outside information has made KM a basic requirement in projects. Third projects need to be completed on time for survival; KM helps to leverage knowledge in such competition (p. 29).

[…] The investment pattern is catching on in many parts of the world, and recent additions to the KM area are the two most populous countries of the world, China and India. In most situations the technology side of KM has high visibility in market terms of supply and demand, and policies relating to them become embedded in the various official documents. In order to sustain the growth, countries should adopt KM on a balanced scale (score card) emphasizing budget allocation and information policies. Applying KM on this sound platform will contribute to low inflation and concomitant monetary policies around the globe (p. 35).

An attempt to parse this last paragraph will leave one scratching his or her head wondering how countries are added, “ […] to the KM area”. And, one is dazzled to find that Kaplan and Norton's (1992) notion of the balanced scorecard can prevent inflation and profoundly affect global monetary policies.

One final example should suffice to give the reader a good taste for this work:

[…] Data, information, and knowledge are the lifeblood of any organisation. Programs, projects, and processes cannot interact and work collectively to achieve a common purpose unless they exchange content among themselves. Thus, it is correct to say that content management is (or should be) everywhere, supporting the work of the organization (p. 195).

If “programs, projects, and processes” were required to exchange information rather than the more ambiguous content, how would this differ from the need for an information management system?

It is difficult to understand how a highly regarded technical publisher such as the ASIST did not demand more rigorous editing of the text before permitting it to be published.