There's No Such Thing As ... Knowledge Management?

There's an important discussion going on over at Martin Roell's Das E-Business Weblog, revisiting the question whether Knowledge Management exists. Martin began the discussion with his post asserting, "Knowledge Management does not exist. Personal Knowledge Management does."

Professor Tom Wilson has added a comment reiterating his position that KM, including Personal KM, does not exist. Here are some of his points and my reactions:

[W]hat Martin has described as 'personal knowledge management' has been known for decades as 'personal information management'(we even offer courses in the subject for Ph.D. students to aid their effectiveness in the role) - so you really can't win there. The management of information resources is information management.

Prof. Wilson recasts this objection several times by pointing to various other disciplines, such as organizational development, organizational communication, the AI community, librarianship, information technologies, and information systems specialists. His overall claim seems to be that KM is just any or all of these pre-existing disciplines relabeled. He prefers to call personal knowledge management "information resource management."

My general reaction to that line of argument is that it's like pointing at various workers on an assembly line and saying that the one who twists a set of nuts on bolts is really a mechanic and the one who sprays paint on the door is really a painter and then concluding that we've always had mechanics and painters, so the assembly line - as a business process - does not exist.

Of more interest is Prof. Wilson's definition of knowledge itself:

'Knowledge' is not only personal, it is also only an evolutionary mental process - we formulate what we know 'on the fly' in response to situations in which we find ourselves, where we often have to adapt 'what we know' to novelty in those situations. Before being prompted by the situation we would probably be unable to make the relevant 'knowledge' explicit.

This definition seems to restrict what may be treated as "knowledge" to those momentary flashes of inspiration or innovation when we react to a set of stimuli and draw on our stores of information to formulate a response in a brief, unknowable, "black-box" kind of process.

I've been trying to grasp the contours of this definition by applying it to the knowledge work I did for many years as an appellate lawyer. Does he mean that the only knowledge work I did was, for example, pulling together an answer to a question from a judge while on my feet during an oral argument?

What about the extended process of pulling together many answers to my own formulation of the "Questions Presented" by the appeal in my written legal brief? That process took days, weeks, occasionally months. Was that form of creative problem solving not knowledge work?

Prof. Wilson appears to address this time dimension as follows:

I'm working on another paper in which I try to unpick why km is such a problem and the essence of it is this. Under the IM paradigm, the information system's (or information worker's) interest in the information resource virtually ceases with the dissemination of the information to the information user - the 'life-cycle' of information virtually ends at this point, except that the cycle is generally drawn as an open spiral - the information received is used to generate more information for treatment in the life cycle. How it is used is usually left out of the cycle.

What the kind of km advocated by Martin is associated with is, in effect, an extension of the life-cycle to a concern with what happens to the information AFTER it has been received by the user - is it locally stored? is it shared? is it used creatively by the individual or a group ('community of practice') for organizational or research purposes?, etc., etc.

Here, I think, is the root of the problem with Prof. Wilson's treatment of Martin's concept of personal knowledge management. He focuses on the life-cycle of information and labels KM as merely an extension of that cycle.

But KM is concerned with more than just the life cycle of information. It is concerned with the life cycle of knowledge. This includes both the artifacts or representations of knowledge (which might have that fleeting life cycle, after which they become information) and the processes by which knowledge is acquired, created, and conveyed (which are not necessarily so brief).

Insisting that KM is merely an extension of the information life-cycle seems to me like calling whales an extension of the plankton life cycle. Correct from a certain point of view, but not very helpful to understanding whales.

KM practicioners such as Mark McElroy and Joe Firestone promote a model of KM which they call the Knowledge Life Cycle, or KLC:

From McElroy, M, The New Knowledge Management : Complexity, Learning, and Sustainable Innovation, p. 6. In their model, KM at the organizational level embraces the entire realm of management activity, from the processes for defining the organizations goals and strategies down to the ways problems are solved in day to day operations.

In the KM model I've been working on (see my last two posts), their KLC would mostly occur in the middle section (Connecting the Dots). Thus, in my view, KM must extend outside the organization or beyond the individual knowledge worker and cover a longer time dimension of what knowledge workers do.

And that brings me back to where I think Prof. Wilson's dismissal of KM goes astray. His analysis is built on asking KM practicioners what they do. I think we should instead focus on asking what knowledge workers do.

They study and practice of helping knowledge workers and their organizations do what they do better is KM. When we focus further on helping individual knowledge workers, we call it Personal KM. While calling it "improving personal effectiveness," as Prof. Wilson suggests, or "work effectiveness improvement," as Dave Pollard has been writing, might be more descriptive, I'm content to keep the term Knowledge Management.

The effectiveness improvement labels leave out the word knowledge, which I think is a useful part of the label. It helps keep us digging toward understanding what goes on in those "black-box" moments Prof. Wilson describes. (Yes, I know, this bring fields like cognitive psychology and lots of neuro-sciences under the umbrella, too. That's part of my point. KM is a big field.) And talking about knowledge also forces us to think about what we mean by knowledge work, knowledge economy, etc.

In the end, the worry over labeling seems a distraction to me. It's important and valuable to question what we mean by KM and to add understandings like we're really "concerned with improving personal effectiveness" to our definitions of Personal KM. But instead of getting bogged down in which label to use, let's take those understandings and get on with applying them to real knowledge workers in real knowledge work settings.

The fact that KM as a discipline is in its infancy and still working out its definitions, scope, etc., does not disprove its existence. The history of human thought has consistently been marked by established disciplines attempting to ignore, ridicule, or stifle new ideas and disciplines. Let's spend some time working with the ideas being generated by KM practicioners before we reject it.