A few years ago whenever I mentioned knowledge management to a client I
usually got a blank look in return. Things have changed considerably – people
recognise the label but have widely differing views on what it means. This is
understandable – ever since an early conference session with Karl-Erik Sveiby
where he defined knowledge management (KM) as an oxymoron it has been clear
that one thing KM was not going to be, was straightforward.
Most practitioners would agree that as awareness has grown
so has confusion. This is understandable in that those new to the approach are
clearly trying to fit it with their current world view while those who were
there in the beginning have moved on considerably. To get a feel for these
developments you only have to look at the KM view from someone like Dave
Snowden – complexity theory, autopoetic systems, and social network analysis are
some of the current hot KM topics.
The most common view of knowledge management though is
little more than information management in a shiny new coat. There is much talk
of knowledge bases, about sharing best practice and connecting with experts but
these technology driven capabilities have been with us for years – they’ve just
never been positioned as KM solutions before. It’s true that to some extent KM
has re-vitalised the information and communications technology agenda but to
see this as the purpose of KM is missing the point.
Going back to our oxymoron – the word ‘management’ is
probably the key culprit. This implies a command and control
model that sits uneasily with the whole concept of knowledge but take a little time to think about how important knowledge is to the way we currently
work and you will begin to understand why knowledge has crept into almost
all aspects of our 21st century lives. The knowledge society,
knowledge economy, knowledge companies, knowledge workers are all terms in
common usage. Whether people actually understand what these terms mean is another matter but the fact that they exist indicates a growing awareness of
the importance of knowledge as a key driver for organisational development.
So what does KM look like without the M? Depending upon your
requirements it can look pretty similar - knowledge bases, CoPs, expert
locators can all feature in your organisation’s approach to knowledge but
dropping the M can open up entirely new views of the role of knowledge within
your organisation.
Significantly, one of the most useful of these views is that
pioneered by Karl Erik-Sveiby himself. His ‘intellectual capital’ model develops the idea of
the knowledge organisation:
“..one must be able to see an organization as a knowledge
organization, that is to see the business from the standpoint of knowledge, see
it as consisting of nothing but knowledge in the broadest sense, and see that
it is the manager’s job to manage and develop this knowledge.”
From ‘The New Organizational Wealth – Managing and
Measuring Knowledge Based Assets’, Karl-Erik Sveiby. You can read the Foreward to the latest edition
(in Korean) on Karl-Erik's web site.
I intend to develop this ‘view’ of KM and intellectual capital in future entries.
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