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Knowledge is the important word in KM

Jun 15th, 2007
by Lou Paglia.

Are we in the beginning of a shift from holding so strongly to the words ‘knowledge management’? And if not, should it begin immediately? My sense is that ‘knowledge enablement’ is a potentially a much stronger word for what organizations are aiming to achieve.

The opening sentence of the Wikipedia entry for Knowledge Management is:

Knowledge Management comprises a range of practices used by organisations to identify, create, represent, and distribute knowledge for reuse, awareness and learning.

Reading a couple of posts from the Fast Forward blog, there is some interesting debate regarding knowledge management, its relevancy and whether it is an impediment to fostering enterprise 2.0 value in the workplace.  Paula Thornton wrote Knowledge Doesn’t Want to be Managed, ending with the statement that ‘KM is dead’, later following up with KM Nerves are Raw.

However, my sense is that perhaps we are keying too strongly on the word ‘management’ in the entire equation.  Sure, in the past, organizations tried to manage (aka control) knowledge and information.  Some still do, but many are leveraging the power of their organizations, the new thinking of digital natives and very often the power of 2.0 technologies to strengthen their knowledge strategies.

Knowledge Management doesn’t mean ‘knowledge control’.  In that I do agree with Paula’s early point “The promise of 2.0 is to ‘free’ the knowledge.”  Knowledge does want to be free, free to be disseminated by experts and leveraged by all, particularly the ones that need it.

So perhaps KE should be the term of the new era.  It is about Knowledge Enablement, Knowledge Empowerment, Knowledge Evangelism and Knowledge Everywhere. 

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Viewing 12 Comments

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    Lou, as you know from the last time we went down this road, I am very skeptical, if not downright jaundiced, about the way we use the word "knowledge."


    http://correlate.wordpress.com/2007/05/08/still-a-major-pain-pointknowledge-management/#comments


    My opinion has not changed much since your last post; but, in the interest of my positive thinking, I would like to offer a "modest proposal" for an alternative strategy. The basic idea is this: Since the proper domain of management is concerned with what people DO, we should pay more attention to the ACTIONS that take place in any work situation and then direct our inquiry towards how those actions come to occur. To a great extent our actions ARE informed by what we know; but because, like the fox, we know a great many things, we cannot fall back on a vague concept like "knowledge" to satisfy our inquiry. Rather, in the tradition of Max Weber, we need to take a more analytic approach to the actions themselves and then, in a parallel tradition of Kenneth Burke, we need to take an equally analytic approach to the MOTIVES that drive those actions.


    I fear that the concept of knowledge management is predicated on the myth that organizations will function more effectively (and, hopefully, more efficiently in the bargain) if they have better access to better knowledge. I believe this myth needs to be blasted away by the proposition that organizations can only function more effectively when they have more effective managers (and anyone who has given a serious reading to the Nonaka-Takeuichi KNOWLEDGE-CREATING COMPANY book knows full well that the authors support this, particularly in the case they make for the value of middle management). From this point of view, we need managers who are better at "reading" the actions that take place "on their watch" and making tactical (and sometimes strategic) decisions based on those "readings."

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    Stephen, unless I'm misunderstanding your point or the element you "disagree", I don't think our points are mutually exclusive or perhaps even conflicting.


    You are making the point that organizations "need managers who are better at “reading” the actions that take place “on their watch” and making tactical (and sometimes strategic) decisions based on those “readings."

    Could these intuitive managers also be the managers that put tactical and strategic initiatives in place that foster knowledge enablement and even knowledge creation?

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    Just to be difficult, I've always thought that we should just concentrate on "Knowledge Management" as a whole phrase to describe what the Australian Standard KM guide (AS 5037—2005) defines as "A trans-disciplinary approach to improving organisational outcomes and learning, through maximising the use of knowledge. It involves the design, implementation and review of social and technological activities and processes to improve the creating, sharing, and applying or using of knowledge. Knowledge management is concerned with innovation and sharing behaviours, managing complexity and ambiguity through knowledge networks and connections, exploring smart processes, and deploying people-centric technologies." It also talks about KM as one of many valid management points of view that help managers to understand their organisations and inform their actions. See http://www.saiglobal.com/shop/script/Details.as...>

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    Lou, I suspect our major disagreement is over comfort with using the word "knowledge" at all! Having learned from Socrates (via Plato) what an elusive concept it is, I try to avoid it when there is a risk of confusing rather than enlightening. Nevertheless, I am quite fond of a motto coined by my former colleague (and friend) Noam Cook to the effect that "knowledge cannot be shared but can be made sharable." So another take on my point is that an effective manager knows how to institute those structures and processes through which knowledge "can be made sharable." This is not necessarily a matter of intuition; but, taking a page from Isaiah Berlin's analysis of political judgment, it probably requires a cognitive skill that is as good at "reading situations" as it is at reading texts!

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    James, welcome to correlate! I actually like that definition of Knowledge Management quite a lot, it hits on all the high points including organizational learning and improving social activities in the pursuit thereof. Thanks for the contribution.

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    Stephen, I would agree with your sentiment about knowledge cannot be shared, only information can. It is up to the recipient of that information, if they are able to distill knowledge from the information.


    Regardless of what definitions we come up with, my main point I believe still holds which is on which side of the aisle you are regarding the word "management". From James' contribution above, it sure sounds a lot like facilitation and enablement to me (as you say, making it sharable). The most strict definition is when it gets to the point of information or knowledge control. With web 2.0 technologies, the control aspect is heading towards the minority view of what KM is, it is more about enablement.

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    Lou, you are beginning to home in on a point that Richard Daft and Karl Weick tried to make in their 1984 ACADEMY OF MANAGEMENT REVIEW paper entitle, "Toward a Model of Organizations as Interpretation Systems." Unfortunately, their characterization of interpretation was (for my money at least) too heavy on the positivist side (which is to say too eager to abstract away the human aspects of the people who constitute an organization). For several years I have been preaching that effective management now requires a strong appreciation for the insights of hermeneutics, which, over the last two centuries, had progressed quite a ways from the deciphering of obscure Biblical texts. Indeed, Paul Ricoeur even made a good case for the fact that hermeneutic analysis could be applied to actions (including, of course, communicative actions), as well as texts. Since this approach tends to reflect back on the conception of the Semantic Web (and how realistic that conception is), you might want to take a look at a post from my older Yahoo! 360 blog at:


    http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-Mff23hgidqmHGqbcv.lfskakEtS6qLVHUEMFUG4-?cq=1&p=7

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    To resurrect a concept I stood by in the Tom Davenport heyday, we don't want to manage knowledge, we want to facilitate thinking.


    Knowledge is a specific state...an instance. It can no more be managed than stored.


    Besides...it's not the knowledge that is relevant...no more than its the data that's important. They're necessary but insufficient. The REAL opportunity...the differentiator lies with the heuristics...the thing that defines space between the parts.


    It's about relationships. [Totally contrary to the results delivered by relational databases.]

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    [flame alert]


    I dare say that the skepticism I voiced in Comment 1 just keeps getting reinforced as the Comments accumulate! I remember back in 1995 when my Wells Fargo bank teller (I am almost certain that his position had some other label) wanted to talk about "relationships." It became almost immediately apparent that he could not get beyond utter claptrap (not that different from those who now read from the CRM-based scripts). He did not last very long; and, for that matter, it did not take much for me to be persuaded to take my business to another bank! We really are not going to get very far if we persist in playing games with nouns that we do not understand very well, since those nouns only distract us from getting on with our business. We certainly are not going to solve problems of ineffective management by throwing philosophical nouns at them!


    Unfortunately, the IT concept of data has engendered a fixation with the static that has debilitated our capacities for both thinking and acting. We only seem to be able to deal with "specific states" that we can hold before us an examine. Even the "business process" is an impoverished abstraction that tries to reduce the complexities of work practices to "specific states." (Needless to say, the idea that knowledge had anything to do with specific states was shot full of holes back when Plato documented how Socrates would needle his students; and the holes are still there, probably bigger than ever!)


    Effective managers know better than to try to freeze the world into a state they can examine. (Isaiah Berlin made this point very nicely when he wrote about Bismarck.) It may be that IT has ultimately sapped managers of the skills they once had for dealing with the flow of activities of business WHILE THEY ARE FLOWING; and we can now witness the consequences of this "addiction to the static" just about every day. Unfortunately, our perceptions have become so warped that we barely recognize these consequences, let alone summon the will to do anything about them!


    [flame off]

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    Paula, completely agree, it is about facilitating thinking...

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    Stephen, I appreciate your passion and fundamentally I agree that it would be most effective when managing within the flow. But while knowledge utopia does not exist, we must move forward in business with the best of our abilities. I don't think it is because people are ineffective. I also don't want to limit the importance/value of taking a snapshot at a given point in time or a given state. It has worked in finance for years, there are balance sheets that manage assets at a given point in time. And the standard practice has been to look at company financial quarter-to-quarter, year-to-year.

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    From the perspective of finance, I once proposed to a friend of mine at Accenture that the sort of snapshots you describe are analogous to what is called "taking the history of the patient" in medicine. I then proposed that I could prepare a talk for him on the value of using the practice of health maintenance (disregarding the contamination of that process by business interests) as a better metaphor for business operations than curing disease. The former is actually more consistent with artifacts such as those quarterly reports; but my friend warned that such an analogy might be too "radical" for his colleagues!


    My point is that, in health maintenance, we take snapshots as a way to think about the TRANSITIONS between the states. More specifically, we want to know if the "flow of body processes" is "running smoothly" or if there are indications of "malfunctioning behavior." My guess is that, in your work in finance, you do (did?) this without thinking consciously about it; but I fear that the real danger of "IT thinking" is that we end up abstracting away some of the most important parts of what we do unconsciously in the interests of system implementation. This is the basis for my Cassandra-like passions; and I seem to be reminded of the dangers I fear just about every day in at least one of my business interactions!

 

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