Bamblog

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I’ve come across an interesting, sometimes slightly sarcastic article by T.D. Wilson: The nonsense of ‘knowledge management’. [and just discovered that it is at the heart of a discussion that took place in June, over at Martin Roell’s weblog. Ah, I’ll post this anyway…].
Based on a critical meta-analysis of 80 journal papers on Knowledge Management, of definitions of Knowledge Management given by management consultancies as well as course descriptions given by business schools, Wilson comes to the conclusion "that, in many cases, ‘knowledge management’ is being used simply as a synonym for ‘information management’."
Citing David Weinberger, Wilson calls it "search and replace management" - and even international organizations can do it: "The European Union’s Fifth Framework Programme made great play with the concept of ‘the Information Society’; however, when the Sixth Framework Programme was announced all the material that formerly appeared under the heading of ‘the Information Society’ appeared under the new heading - ‘the Knowledge Society’! No conceptual differences - just search and replace marketing."

In detail, his review of the journal papers shows: "first, it is curious that the vast majority of papers are in special issues of journals and that, in some cases, no other paper has been published on this topic in the same journal since 2001. This suggests that the topic has not entered the normal stream of papers in these journals using the same terminology - although papers on the same subjects - expert systems, decision making, decision support systems, etc., - have continued to be published. The second point reflects the first: there is absolutely no agreement on what constitutes ‘knowledge management’ and, in the case of the special issues there is a suspicion that the papers have adopted this terminology simply to be published in that issue. Thirdly, those papers that seriously address the question of whether knowledge can be managed generally conclude that it cannot and that the topic breaks down into the management of information and the management of work practices. On the basis of this evidence, we appear to be with Alice in the land through the looking-glass, listening to Humpty Dumpty’s theory of language.
While Wilson shows that individual consultants such as Sveiby, Drucker and Miller are quite frank that knowledge is something that cannot be managed, he is more critical when it comes to management consultancies: They mainly use ‘knowledge’ as a synonym for ‘information’ (thus KM meaning ‘information management’); "The conclusion to this brief exploration of consultancy Web sites is that ‘knowledge management’ means different things to different companies and that one or two of them that have previously dabbled with the idea have moved on to other things."
Finally, the business schools: "One’s overall impression, from this review of business school sites is that the most prestigious steer well away from ‘knowledge management’, other than in the statements of interest of faculty. Nor does the subject appear to enter significantly into the teaching programmes. The sites often include documents in the form of reports, working papers, or draft papers and these reveal the same difficulties with the concept as shown in the review of journals."

Wilson goes on to clarify some conceptual confusion. Rather than contrasting "explicit knowledge" (=information") with "tacit knowledge", one should use three terms: explicit knowledge = Information, implicit knowledge (information that is not yet explicit but can be made so), tacit knowledge (knowledge that cannot be made explicit; this is how Polanyi, who coined the term, originally used it). Extending his analysis I’d argue that organizational "Knowledge management" thus can either be "information management" (introducing and managing practices to handle explicit knowledge = information) or "implicit knowledge management" (introducing and managing practices to support making implicit knowledge explicit, in order to be processed by information management). Following Martin Roell, "knowledge management" makes only sense as "personal knowledge management" - and then it should rather be called "managing your personal strategies to improve the handling of information in order to create knowledge" - ok, maybe a somewhat shorter term might be helpful…