How do you manage knowledge? Isn’t ‘knowledge management’ a nonsensical phrase? How can knowledge actually be managed?
In case you’ve never come across T.D. Wilson’s paper The nonsense of ‘knowledge management’, it’s well worth a read.
Wilson’s argument is basically that knowledge management is a management fad, as are other things like ‘organizational learning’, ‘customer relationship management’ and ‘business process re-engineering’.
Attached to this is the notion of the ‘knowledge worker’. If we take a look at a list of attributes a knowledge worker should have, we see that the number one attribute is being ‘knowledgeable’.
Take a careful look at that list. Does it really describe anything that would not be desirable in any worker?
Back to T.D. Wilson’s point. His point was that ‘knowledge management’ has just replaced other phrases like ‘information services’ because it simply sounds better.
I would have to agree with Wilson’s point — too often we, in the knowledge management world, use phrases like ‘knowledge acquisition’ when we really just mean learning. Human language has evolved to the point where we’ve named almost everything, but it’s quite easy to coin new words and phrases to describe abstract concepts, thereby making them sound newer than they actually are.
But on the other hand, it’s not all nonsense. Knowledge management certainly encompasses a complex set of other fields’ expertise (which often results in knowledge management folks’ expertise actually residing in other fields).
But to Wilson’s point, let’s call things what they are. If you mean information, call it information.
Wilson also has a big problem with ‘tacit’ and ‘explicit’ knowledge. How can you make the knowledge in someone’s head go from tacit to explicit? Isn’t it then information?
Does it matter what you call it? Is ‘knowledge management’ just a confusing phrase that doesn’t mean anything to you? What differentiates information from knowledge?
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January 24th, 2007 at 1:05 pm
[...] Is knowledge management just nonsense? [...]
January 24th, 2007 at 1:56 pm
Knowledge, rather than just knowledge management, advances our society. Science is very limited and relatively irrelevant in comparison to social and life sciences, which are contained in post-science http://www.post-science.com. Even knowledge management needs new discoveries in post-science, such as Universal Permanent Numbers http://www.pn123.com to assign integer names to all knowledge and completely automated software to remember the meaning of these integer names. Thank you for your interest.
February 17th, 2007 at 1:36 pm
I have always held that “knowledge management” *is* an oxymoron. You can’t manage knowledge - nobody can, except perhaps their own (but even that is arguable!).
What you can do, however, (and I think this is where the Wilson paper misses the point somewhat in his desire to push home the dinstinctions between information and knowledge) is manage the *environment* in which knowledge management is shared and new value is created.
In the same vein, “customer management” (as CRM is now more often known) is of course impossible - our customers aren’t sheep - we can’t herd them where we want to go. But - through excellent customer service, effective brand, great products, marketing and feedback, we can manage the environment in which customers are more likely to choose and remain “ours”.
Managing the environment for knowledge exchange is the real domain for “knowledge management” to make a difference. I don’t really care whether we choose to call is “explicit knowledge” or “information” - that’s just semantics.
What I *do* care about is that something has happened which means that knowledge has been shared because of an intervention.
That intervention might be the activity of a network or community:
It might be an honest exchange of experience between peers (you could call this a peer assist, or it could be a simple conversation).
It might be a way of benchmarking performance which closes the gap between the best and worst performers.
It might be it might be a good practice which has been written down, videoed, wikied, blogged, podcast, vidcast, RSSed…
The medium and channel don’t really matter - what matters is that knowledge which might have remained un-shared, has been shared.
Knowledge Management is all about making those interventions more frequent, more natural, more instinctive… and more expected and role-modelled by leaders of organisations.
Plenty of challenge there!
February 17th, 2007 at 3:33 pm
You raise some excellent points Chris.
I agree completely that the debate about semantics (’explicit knowledge’ versus ‘information’) doesn’t really matter too much in the end — a name is a name.
Knowledge management is certainly an unfortunate choice of phrase in a sense, since much of what ‘knowledge mangement’ is about is really just about encouraging sharing (I greatly prefer the term knowledge sharing to knowledge management — sharing sounds much more like what we’re trying to accomplish in any knowledge management endeavour).
A great deal of knowledge management is also about tapping into people’s natural, inherent common sense and providing them with clear incentives to do what they might not otherwise readily do (or even just realize what those incentives are).
Thanks for sharing your insights with everyone reading.
February 18th, 2007 at 5:02 pm
[...] Mon 19 Feb 2007 Herding Cats and “the nonsense of knowledge management” Posted by chriscollison under Uncategorized I ran a lunchtime session at the National School of Government on Friday, and used the video below to illustrate that knowledge management is an oxymoron. It’s really about managing (creating, nurturing, protecting, supporting, technologically enabling) the environment for knowledge sharing - not attempting the impossible cat-herding task of managing what’s in the heads of individuals… More detailed comment from me on this topic on the Uncommon Knowledge Blog. [...]
March 16th, 2007 at 12:37 am
Here here to all the comments above.
I have always thought that Knowledge Management is a great example of making the simple complex. This is particularly the case where software based KM ’solutions’ are hawked with great fanfare.
(I worked for a while in the recruitment industry which was characterized by wizz-bang databases purporting to capture everything about every candidate, then spit out the right candidate for a new job. The reality was that the best results came when one of us had actually met a candidate and knew them to be right for the job)
The best way to encourage knowledge sharing - which is what we’re really talking about - is to promote good old-fashioned face-to-face communication - and informal communication at that. A great example of a perfectly good approach which has been lost under the weight of technology.
March 16th, 2007 at 8:42 am
I agree completely David. There is no substitute for face-to-face communication. While technology can be a great enabler, it is certainly not a substitute for actual meetings in person. Too often technology acts as a substitute for face-to-face interaction, and as you said, can often impede that interaction.
A perfect example that I’m sure everyone can relate to is trying to explain something to someone in a chain of emails — when picking up the phone would make the explanation much easier, and meeting up face-to-face would make it even easier than over the phone.
March 29th, 2007 at 1:53 pm
[...] Chris is a fantastic resource on anything collaborative (and has even been kind enough to leave an insightful comment [...]
April 16th, 2007 at 10:18 pm
[...] good thinking about what is really tacit knowledge, and a synthesis of a lot of point of views. Nice commentary on it [...]
March 9th, 2008 at 7:43 pm
[...] I thought my post about the potential decline of knowledge management on my other blog, memetiks.com, might interest my readers here. While I suggested in that post that the declining searches on Google Trends may be due to an increased understanding of what KM is about, I’m still reminded of the knowledge-management-as-nonsense argument. [...]