Knowledge Management is Dead, Long Live Management of Knowledge
Knowledge Management (KM) as a term has been with us for some time, in fact Polanyi first started lecturing on the topic in the 1960s. But it wasn’t until the Internet revolution that the term became popular. So popular in fact that it became fashionable to have Chief Knowledge Officers on the board. But Knowledge officers aren’t new either, the Egyptian priests who guarded and cared for the papyrus scrolls fulfilled the same function. Taking explicit (written knowledge) and applying their know-how (tacit knowledge) to the interpretation of the scrolls.
Unfortunately KM has bit of a bad name these days, and I lay the blame for this at the door of the IT industry who spun up the need for information management to be more than management of information in order to sell more IT equipment and services. If we look at Polanyi’s definition of knowledge, way back in the dark ages, then knowledge can only live in the mind of the beholder. So how then can databases suddenly become knowledge bases? How can an IT system on its own improve the actions and judgements of our decision makers? It can’t.
IT and the Internet has revolutionised the way we do business, but it can only take us so far. The IT industry is on its last evolutions with social computing, as it comes closer to facilitating tacit (all the stuff that cannot be captured on IT systems) human-to-human knowledge sharing. You will have noticed for example a change in emphasis in Microsoft and Cisco systems amongst others, as they introduce the term Human into their marketing. The next step in achieving business improvement is taking these new social computing tools such as wikis and blogs etc, and using them alongside quality human management practises that allow tacit knowledge sharing and creation. To paraphrase Lynda Gratton from London Business School if the 80s were about financial control and change in a week, and the 90s were about internet-working and change in a month, then the next decade or so is about harvesting intellectual capital over the timeframe of years. To grow our human and intellectual capital resources, we need to manage our knowledge.
Long live management of knowledge!
Author
Simon Moore
Director
Dytecna Knowledge Services
www.dytecna.com
