Knowledge Management (KM) Processes in Organizations - Chapter 1 -

Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION

WHAT IS KM?

1.      Davenport,T. (1994) tells about KM movement :

“Knowledge management is the process of capturing, distributing, and effectively using knowledge” 

( This definition has the virtue of being simple, stark, and to the point )

2. The Gartner Group created the second definition of KM, which is perhaps the most frequently cited one (Duhon, 1998):

A discipline that promotes an integrated approach to identifying, capturing, evaluating, retrieving, and sharing all of an enterprise’s information assets. These assets may include databases, documents, policies, procedures, and previously uncaptured expertise and experience in individual workers.

( This definition is a bit more specific and informative, and it is illuminating because it makes explicit not just conventional information and knowledge units, but also “tacit knowledge,” or implicit knowledge, that which is known, but not captured in any formal or explicit fashion ).

3. McInerney, C. [2002] is that “KM is an effort to increase useful knowledge within the organization. Ways to do this include encouraging communication, offering opportunities to learn, and promoting the sharing of appropriate knowledge objects or artifacts.”

( This definition emphasizes the interactive aspect of KM, that is, knowledge sharing by people rather than the common understanding of knowledge management as a system used to organize what we might call ‘knowledge objects.’ )

Upon being asked at a cocktail party to define Knowledge Management, one may offer an apt

definition, comprised of primarily 3 distinct parts:

1) Classic Library and Information Science and Information Retrieval.

2) ICT, Information and Communication Technology.

3) HR,HumanRelations,changing the culture of the organization to facilitate knowledge sharing and use.

Another way to understand KM may be to examine its history and development.

THE HISTORY AND DEVELOPMENT OF KM

In the article entitled “Where Did Knowledge Management Come From” written in 1999, Prusak states that KM first appeared “about seven years ago,” i.e., in 1992, and describes a conference in Boston in 1993 as “a good milestone to mark the beginning of the knowledge management time-line” [Prusak, L., 1999]

The earliest instances of KM, as the term is understood today, derive from the consulting world, from which the principles of KM eventually spread to other disciplines. The consulting firms quickly realized the potential of the Intranet flavor of the Internet for linking together their own geographically dispersed knowledge based organizations. They then understood that the expertise they had gained was a product that could be sold to other organizations. That product needed a name, and the name chosen, or at least arrived at, was Knowledge Management.

In his article the origins of KM, Prusak in fact, felt it appropriate to say “some skeptics may believe that consultants developed knowledge management to replace declining revenues from the waning re-engineering movement” [Prusak, L., 1999]. The two enthusiasms, KM and re-engineering, are related in that both were driven by increased ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) capabilities. However, the timing, though convenient for the consulting firms, was driven not by their convenience, but by the straightforward dynamics of ICT capability growth.

KM was dependent upon the appearance of the Internet, while pre internet, ICT already enabled the major restructuring of an organization’s work flows and processes. In a sense, KM also has roots in the implementation of Supply Chain Management (SCM) software and business process reengineering (BPR) as well as the more recent development of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP). IT development has always displayed a pattern, of growth from more structured data to less tractable, less well structured, or comparatively unstructured data.  SCM & BPR & ERP to KM, represent a logical and predictable progression toward unstructured information and knowledge.

Leistner says that knowledge must be connected with people to be a viable term Koenig,M, KM has two parents, the enthusiasm for and the appreciation of intellectual capital, and the development of the Internet and its offspring, intranets and extranets.

“Intellectual Capital” representing the awareness that as PeterDrucker [Hibbard, J., 1997, p. 46] put it:

We now know that the source of wealth is something, specifically human knowledge. If we apply knowledge to tasks that we obviously know how to do, we call it productivity.

If we apply knowledge to tasks that are new and different, we call it innovation. Only knowledge allows us to achieve those two goals.

INTELLECTUAL CAPITAL DEVELOPS AND DECLINES

A pioneer in the Intellectual Capital (IC) field was Karl-Eric Sveiby [Sveiby, K., 1989, 1997, 2001], whose book The Invisible Balance Sheet was a key work in the development of thinking about Intellectual Capital.From this early writing, Sveiby’s ideas developed smoothly and rapidly into KM.

The work of Buckman, R. [2004] at BuckmanLaboratories and Hubert St.Onge [Chatzkel, J.,2000] at the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce and Clarica Insurance were key implementations in operationalizing the concept and in popularizing IC. Also very important was the Stewart,T. [1994] article in Fortune magazine, “Intellectual Capital, Your Company’s Most Valuable Asset.”

THE INTERNET EMERGES

As the Internet emerged, the business world realized that the Internet could be used to link an

organization together. This was the take off point for large scale recognition of KMas an important innovation, and it was the stimulus for its development [Koenig,M., 1996, 1998].

THE STAGES OF KM DEVELOPMENT

The Three Stages of KM

STAGE I “By the Internet out of Intellectual Capital”

Information Technology

Intellectual Capital

The Internet (including intranets, extranets, etc.)

Key Phrases: “best practices,” later replaced by the more politic “lessons learned”

STAGE II Human and cultural dimensions, the HR, Human Relations stage

Communities of Practice

Organizational Culture

The Learning Organization (Senge), and

Tacit Knowledge (Nonaka) incorporated into KM

Key Phrase: “communities of practice”

STAGE III Content and Retrievability

Structuring content and assigning descriptors (index terms)

Key Phrases: “ content management” and “taxonomies”

STAGE IV ? Access to External Information

Emphases upon External Information and the recognition of the Importance of Context

Key Terms: “context” and “extranet”

SUPPLEMENTARY WAYS OF LOOKING AT KM

THE FOREST AND THE TREES

A forest of information and knowledge management, whose scope and importance we are still coming to recognize. Furthermore, it is beginning to appear that KM is graduating from being just one of many names on that list, to now becoming the name for that forest of all the trees of information and knowledge management.

The more likely explanation is that of the forests and the trees, the forest being that community of trees listed above that all deal significantly with information and knowledge management. The forest is certainly not going away, nor will it remain static, new trees will emerge, but KM is morphing and expanding in scope to be the name of that forest. We have always had trouble defining KM, and now we have another definition, or more exactly a new metaphor, KM is the name for that newly recognized forest of all the trees of information and knowledge management.

KM AS THE EXTENSION OF THE SUCCESSFUL R&D ENVIRONMENT

A final way to view KM is to observe KM as the movement to replicate the information environment known to be conducive to successful R&D- rich, deep, and open communication and information access - and deploy it broadly across the firm.

The principles and practices of KM have developed in a very conducive environment, given that in this post-industrial information age, an increasingly larger proportion of the population consists of information workers.