“Knowledge is as old as the rocks and as changing as the sea, enmeshed
inextricably in its ways. And you want a clear definition of Knowledge
Management? You must be daft!”
~Paraphrasing Bedford in “The Quality of Travel”
One
of the biggest challenges I have faced, especially facing people from a non-IT
background is to explain what I do! “Knowledge Management? What exactly does
that mean?” is a question I frequently encounter. This post is a result of my quest to come up
with an answer that will get me past a response that I hear “That’s very
interesting”…but which I know really means “ I haven’t got a clue what you’re
talking about”!!! J
The
reason for this ambiguity is not very hard to understand; Knowledge Management
as a term entered the lexicons only about thirty years ago. And even when it did, it came as an offshoot
of an attempt to explain other terms like “knowledge acquisition”, “knowledge-base
systems”, artificial intelligence, expert systems and computer-based ontologies
– sort of a “basket-term” for all of these and much more. Early management theorists like Peter
Drucker, Paul Strassman and Peter Senge contributed to the growing
understanding of knowledge as a key organizational resource with Senge
contributing the cultural dimension with his seminal work “The Fifth Discipline”
where he introduced the concept of “the learning organization”. By the mid-1990s the word had become pretty much
part of organization strategy with important contributions from researchers
like Christopher Bartlett, Dorothy Leonard-Barton, Chris Agyris, Ikujiro Nonaka
and Hirotaka Takeuchi…to name a few.
Knowledge
Management became the new mantra for consulting companies; organizations that
had not had much success with TQM and other business process re-engineering
initiatives now embraced KM as the panacea for all their previous management
blunders. Along the way, the term came
to acquire attributes of performance management, Quality management, Business
Intelligence (the new Decision Support Systems), and what have you.
The rise
of the digital age has added new flavours to knowledge management; Web 2.0
introduced social collaboration to the list of things that KM already stood
for. And with the number of social tools
available in the market, and their attempts at capturing a slice of the
enterprise space, Knowledge Management has never had it so good…in terms of
popularity. Never mind that people still
are unable to define what it really means! J
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