Euan Semple drew our attention on the IR-DISCUSS list to a Weblog from the Netherlands (maintained by Ton Zijlstra) which had an article on 'Monstrous KM', based on a PhD thesis by Martijntje Smits, 'technological philosopher', with the title "Exorcising monsters: the cultural domestication of new technologies". Ton's article is worth reading.
Now, Ton himself joins the debate, through a message to Euan, as follows:
I read with interest the exchange on what KM is in the IR-DISCUSS list-archives of last
month. And my recent posting seems to fit in with what was said there. Also the comment by Sebastian Fiedler, who is focussing on educational questions and problems, will probably be meeting approval in your group:
Yes, there is a problem with using different vocabularies but I strongly believe that part of the "monstrousity of KM" is amplified by the conceptual mess and the lack of epistemological reflection that much of business oriented KM literature displays. Take an article of your choice and replace "knowledge" with "information" ... and you might get a glimpse of what is deeply bothering me. To borrow a line from Ivan Illich..."Some words become so flexible that they cease to be useful." This is what happened largely to the term "knowledge" from my point of view. And could it be that what Ton calls the "industrial command and control style" is still widely associated with the notion of "management"? No wonder that KM was born as a monster and that would only take food from the technocrats in many organizations...
I most certainly agree with Sebastian there. He precisely points to why the term KM is a misnomer, and its (to me absurd) implication that knowledge can actually be managed. The coiner of the term KM, Karl Wiig, who introduced it in 1986, now bitterly regrets having done so.
As to what KM is, and how to define it, to me the following points are relevant:
At the core of KM is a paradigmshift from taking the organisation and its structures as a starting point to taking the individual and his knowledge as a starting point. The most poignant difference probably being the question whether you view employees as costs, or as individuals with the knowledge that makes your business succesful, i.e. the source of all your revenue. Karl Sveiby is probably one of the best known consultancy names taking this approach
.
KM is not a discipline in its own right, it is multidisciplinary to the core, taking the point above as it's angle of approach. So in that sense there is nothing 'new' about KM, other then making assumptions about what to
> do with the results from a host of disciplines. The learning organization of Senge indeed fits in rather well with that, and to me Senge's ideas are very important concepts.I would not say that KM is relabeling the Learning Organization. Senge's work is part of the evolution of KM-thinking in the past two decades.
IM HRM and other fields of M are not subsets of KM, but are the fields in a company that should be influenced by a KM approach.
I hope you don't mind me intruding on your group's deliberations, and would like to know a bit more about your backgrounds. The referrer logs of my web server seem to indicate a lot of .ac.uk addresses today.
I'm sure I speak for all on the list when I say that we certainly don't mind Ton coming into the debate, although the list has not been very actively recently - it only seems to boil up around the mention of 'km'! :-)
