It is now clear that the knowledge continuum which began early in the last century has brought a new understanding and a new respect for knowledge to our modern management community. Nevertheless, we are not yet in a position to state that an organization’s information, knowledge, and strategic learning content are shared to the extent that organizational stakeholders and affiliates require. We know that most organizations can benefit from better knowledge sharing, not only enterprise-wide but also within (and between) individual departments and business units.
That time will come, and while we are not yet where we want to be with knowledge sharing, we have learned much about how companies, organizations, and all other organized functional entities (including non-profit and not-for-profit organizations, as well as businesses) benefit when methodologies are established for ensuring practical knowledge sharing.
Indeed, our history goes further than most of us think. By the early 1900s, business leaders were beginning to recognize that change was needed with respect to information management, knowledge management, and strategic learning (although these functions had not yet been given the names we use now), and they began to give attention to distinguishing “practical and utilitarian”
information from that sought for personal edification, educational purposes, or entertainment. As a result, across the twentieth century we find many examples of how workers in the sciences, business, and research struggled to deal with the information, knowledge, and strategic learning required to support their work.
By mid-century, business management had begun to take a hard look at how information was managed. Following World War II, the management of infor-mation (particularly scientific inforinfor-mation) had reached a crisis point, and the struggle to deal with overwhelming quantities of information was on-going. As attempts to find solutions were made, information science – as a new discipline for dealing with the situation – became a major undertaking.
The management of information and the move toward the much talked about
“information age” provided many strong and lasting contributions to the overall management of businesses and organizations. Yet while many of these innova-tions and new ways of thinking about information management were identified in many fields (not just in business management, as is widely assumed), the problem continued to grow. More innovation was required, and more solutions, and by the last decade of the century, the evolution of knowledge management (KM) was well under way. Organizational managers had begun to recognize that
operational success could be better and more efficiently realized when the com-pany’s knowledge could be harvested and retrieved for organizational purposes.
Information management to knowledge management. Managing knowledge had been anticipated by several management and enterprise leaders who gave attention to these matters, including the man now regarded as “the father of modern management” (and who had – as described later – come up with the term “knowledge worker”). Peter F. Drucker was not about to permit the value of knowledge in the management arena to be minimized and he was one of the ear-liest management leaders to understand and put forward the concept that knowl-edge in and of itself is intrinsically valued for how it is used:
The search for knowledge, as well as the teaching thereof, has traditionally been disassoci-ated from application. Both have been organized by subject, according to what appeared to be the logic of knowledge itself . . . Now we are increasingly organizing knowledge around areas of application rather than around the subject areas of disciplines. Interdisciplinary work has grown everywhere.
This is a symptom of the shift in the meaning of knowledge from an end in itself to a resource, that is, a means to some result. Knowledge as the central energy of modern society exists altogether in application and when it is put to work . . . . (Drucker, 1969)
So the quest for solutions for managing all the information we were trying to deal with continued, giving rise – in 1982 – to probably one of the most-quoted state-ments we had about the problem: “We are drowning in information but starved for knowledge” (Naisbitt, 1982). John Naisbitt spent his career thinking about the future, and how future generations would deal with the problems he was identi-fying. He put forward his many ideas about the subject in Megatrends, his most influential work. The book was the product of ten years of research and estab-lished Naisbitt as one of the most important thinkers in future studies.
And Naisbitt’s influence was not surprising. By the decade of the 1980s, certain signs were leading organizational leaders to think seriously about the management of information and knowledge. For one thing, increased computer power had put many management leaders on guard that something important was happening. While some of the runes were misread (such as the prediction about the “paperless office” – remember that one?) there was no doubt that the new field of information management and information science would enable sophisticated information capture and retrieval. Lynne Brindley, later Chief Executive, The British Library, has described what happened:
The concept of information strategy was emerging, whereby information and libraries were seen as important knowledge resources to be harnessed and increasingly treated as a strate-gic asset – to underpin teaching and learning, research and knowledge transfer activities – which needed to be valued and managed.
Information strategies emerged in the 1990s in universities, with more or less enthusiasm, and beyond universities the focus was on the discipline of knowledge management, the concept of knowledge exploitation for competitive edge. There was recognition of the increasing eco-nomic value of information – of knowledge, both tacit (in people’s heads) and explicit (more formal), as a key element of the corporate assets of the business. (Brindley, 2009)
Brindley went on to note that a strong proponent in this recognition of the emerg-ing knowledge-based economy was Thomas Stewart, who had defined intellec-tual capital as “intellecintellec-tual material that is put to use to create wealth.” In doing so, Stewart seems to have introduced the concept of KM (although it was not called “KM” at the time): “Intellectual capital,” he said, “is the sum of everything everybody in a company knows that gives it a competitive edge” (Stewart, 1997).
And by 1999 we had Drucker again sharing words of wisdom for us, this time providing us with the perspective we needed for thinking about knowledge as that corporate asset Stewart had identified:
Knowledge workers own the means of production. It is the knowledge between their ears.
And it is a totally portable and enormous capital asset. Because knowledge workers own their means of production, they are mobile . . . .
Management’s duty is to preserve the assets of the institution in its care. What does this mean when the knowledge of the individual knowledge worker becomes an asset and, in more and more cases, the main asset of an institution? What does this mean for personnel policy? What is needed to attract and to hold the highest-producing knowledge workers?
What is needed to increase their productivity? (Drucker, 1999)
So the movement toward “knowledge management” now began to make sense, and KM began to gain attention among leaders in the management community.
As management leaders made the connection between the electronic capture of KM elements with knowledge sharing, performance, and strategic learning, the advantages of KM started to fall into place (and, importantly, to be recognized as corporate advantages).
Managing intellectual capital. For several generations, management and enterprise leaders in organizations and institutions were aware of the work per-formed by knowledge workers. For much of that time though, while the connec-tion between organizaconnec-tional success and the role of those knowledge workers was more or less recognized, little particular attention was focused on their work. That state of affairs began to change in the early 1990s when Stewart called attention to the organization’s intellectual capital and since then, organizational manage-ment and enterprise leaders have made many efforts to incorporate the concept of knowledge management into the workplace.
Was that the beginning of KM? The need for a solution had been apparent for some time. After the information “glut” of the 1950s, following the enormous
growth of scientific and technical information that began during World War II (and which moved quickly into the further focus on scientific and technical information during the Cold War), and following the “information wars” of the 1960s and 1970s when the many disparate players in the information science and research management communities were all seeking to establish manage-ment leadership and authority for all dealings having to do with information and knowledge (commercial, scholarly, governmental, and all other categories of information), it was a natural next step to attempt to come to some understand-ing of the role of knowledge in organizational management and mission-specific success. As it turned out, a great many specialists and scholars in different parts of the world were working on the problem of how to manage these enormous amounts of information, so it was not too much of a stretch to try to apply some of these same techniques and solutions to dealing with the knowledge generated as that information was used, or to seek new techniques and solutions to be applied to the knowledge development and knowledge transfer process. So for some KM historians, the interest in KM as a subject and as a discipline dates to the 1950s.
Whatever the reasons for the growth of KM, people like Drucker and Stewart certainly pointed organizational leaders in the right direction, and the growth of interest in dealing with knowledge – with “managing” knowledge – made a great deal of sense. Indeed, aside from the value to the organization in the accom-plishment of the organizational mission, it seemed to be generally assumed that achieving an understanding of the role of knowledge in the workplace would enable better performance. And why not? One does not attempt to organize and manage knowledge simply because knowledge is inherently good, or because acquiring knowledge makes one a better person. Achieving an understanding of knowledge in one’s life and being able to deal with knowledge come together to foster an independence of thought, for most people a state to be desired, and unquestionably a state to be desired in the workplace. So it would seem to follow that understanding the role of knowledge in the workplace would permit one to give the subject at hand a level of attention that would enable excellence in knowledge asset management, leading to improved high-level research, strength-ened contextual decision-making, accelerated innovation, and excellence in knowledge asset management, the now-recognized benefits of knowledge ser-vices invoked when the subject is discussed.
Thus we recognize a connection between knowledge and the workplace. As managers and organizational leaders began to place value on knowledge and the role of knowledge developed within the organization (and the importance of encouraging an organizational culture in which knowledge is shared by all employees at all levels), it made sense to think about how the organization at large might deal with this elusive and hard-to-capture intellectual capital.
Not surprisingly, by the late 1990s KM had become a function for considerable attention in the management of the well-run enterprise. Michael Dempsey, a journalist with The Financial Times, noted that “the first iteration of knowledge management featured a predictable helping of hype and was embraced by large organizations eager to underline their credentials by appointing a chief knowl-edge officer to spread the KM gospel. That approach belonged to the late 1990s and today businesses are less voluble about the term KM while more of them practice the ideas that gave rise to it” (Dempsey, 2006).
One of the reasons for that “predictable helping of hype” and our enthusiasm for the ideas that led to the rise of KM was simply that the whole idea of dealing with knowledge and attempting to manage knowledge seemed to be something of a contradiction. Could knowledge even be managed? The question has been asked often, and it is answered most often in the negative. Yet there was something very positive about the idea, and despite the difficulties (intellectually speaking) of defining what we were dealing with, it somehow felt “right,” like something we should be doing in the workplace. For many knowledge workers (especially those who would develop expertise in knowledge services and become knowledge strategists), that struggle with “managing” knowledge was put into focus when Larry Prusak – often credited (along with Tom Davenport) with creating the term
“knowledge management” – was interviewed about the subject. He acknowl-edged that he regretted having used the term, and expressed a wish to “take it back.” Knowledge management, he said, “is really working with knowledge. You can’t manage knowledge, per se. It is not a thing that is manageable. You can’t manage love or honor or patriotism or piety. It is clearly working with knowledge, but the words got out there and there it is” (De Cagna, 2001).
Defining KM. So “knowledge management” it is, and at this point in time, many of the concepts associated with KM have become almost commonplace in the management lexicon. How they are put together, though, seems to vary widely in different organizations and environments. So much so that attempt-ing to define KM becomes almost fun, and a big part of the fun is the fact that there are so many definitions and approaches to KM. Indeed, it might even be suggested that there are as many definitions of KM as there are people seeking to define it. It is a situation that leads to a considerable amount of confusion in some circles but in most cases the confusion is made more palatable (and interesting) as those participating in the discussion realize that what they are trying to do makes a great deal of sense. In their conversations they learn very early on that KM is context specific, and that no organization’s specific KD/KS/KU framework is going to be like that of any other organization. KM in any organization is going to relate to and seek to address the organization’s specific needs. In attempting to define KM in their own context-specific formulation, knowledge strategists and
others in the organization discussing the subject are able to open themselves to a rewarding and often very useful intellectual endeavor.
Approaching a definition for KM begins with recognizing that many words and phrases come up with some frequency: “creating business value,” “competi-tive advantage,” “a systematic process,” “leveraged decision-making,” “collabo-rative,” “integrated,” and so forth. Some definitions acknowledge the role of tech-nology, as Amrit Tiwana did when he described KM: “. . . an effective knowledge management strategy is . . . a well-balanced mix of technology, cultural change, new systems, and business focus that is perfectly in step with the company’s business strategy” (Tiwana, 2000). Some definitions identify KM as a process, and others describe the discipline as a methodology for managing intellectual assets (especially unstructured assets) to ensure the creation, capture, organiza-tion, access, and use of those assets.
For some knowledge workers (and/or their managers), the goal is to take those unstructured assets and identify how that information can be transitioned from
“information” to “knowledge,” as Bruce Dearstyne has suggested. Dearstyne, a leader in the records and information management field, defines knowledge management as “cultivating and drawing on tacit knowledge; fostering infor-mation sharing; finding new and better ways to make inforinfor-mation available;
applying knowledge for the strategic advantage of the organization” (Dearstyne, 1999). Other definitions are directly practical. Nigel Oxbrow and Angela Abell, for example, took such an approach when they put forward their definition of KM:
“The ultimate corporate resource has become information – the ultimate compet-itive advantage is the ability to use it – the sum of the two is knowledge manage-ment” (Oxbrow and Abel, 1997).
In attempting to define KM, it soon becomes clear that the function of man-aging knowledge is to ensure that working with knowledge becomes part of the workplace experience for all workers. Thus the function of working with knowl-edge is basically what organizations and institutions are attempting to do when KM is talked about, as we seek to put in place a framework for supporting that function. If the organization is to succeed in achieving its organizational mission, using knowledge developed within the organization and shared among organi-zational stakeholders becomes a critical purpose (Prusak and Davenport, 1998).
Still, there are problems with the many and various definitions applied to KM, and no matter how much intellectual pleasure we have in trying to pursue the discussion, the pleasure cannot alter the fact that in the workplace the dis-cussion must focus on the anticipated KM role in the successful achievement of the organizational mission. For one thing, many of the definitions are not, by and large, particularly practical. It is not unusual for knowledge workers and their managers to experience some difficulty moving from their pleasant intellectual
discussions about KM to identifying exactly how the discipline can be used in their particular workplace. They want to move to KM, and they know it is the right thing to do – to get their arms around the great wealth of knowledge captured within the organization – but making the move does not happen easily.
There are several reasons why this is the case. One constraint comes into play when the discussion turns to the ambiguities built into the definitions.
People begin to ask questions like, “Is KM appropriate for our organization and culture?” or, put another way, “Are we ready for KM?” In many environments,
“knowledge” as a term is a little off-putting, leading some workers (and, indeed, some in supervisory or management positions) to wonder if moving into KM is the right approach, since they have the idea that attention to “knowledge” is too aca-demic, or too intellectual, and not down-to-earth enough with respect to the work of the organization. These arguments are quickly refuted when the discussion moves on to include examples of the costs of wrong information, or of knowledge not shared, or of failing to meet a compliance regulation because a particular knowledge-transfer procedure was not in place.
Discussions about defining KM also get a little sticky when bad examples are put forward (often by workers with limited or pre-conceived ideas about knowl-edge or the advantages of knowlknowl-edge development and knowlknowl-edge sharing in the workplace). Typically based on poorly defined or ill-conceived KM experiences that have not been successful and are often the result of a misplaced or misap-plied technology focus to the subject at hand, these kinds of failures can sour executives and organizational sponsors, resulting in a larger reticence about KM that prevents innovation and intellectual stretching the next time a KM opportu-nity comes along. Even when there is interest in moving to a KM solution, many
Discussions about defining KM also get a little sticky when bad examples are put forward (often by workers with limited or pre-conceived ideas about knowl-edge or the advantages of knowlknowl-edge development and knowlknowl-edge sharing in the workplace). Typically based on poorly defined or ill-conceived KM experiences that have not been successful and are often the result of a misplaced or misap-plied technology focus to the subject at hand, these kinds of failures can sour executives and organizational sponsors, resulting in a larger reticence about KM that prevents innovation and intellectual stretching the next time a KM opportu-nity comes along. Even when there is interest in moving to a KM solution, many