Information Research Weblog

My thanks to Bob Robinson for drawing my attention to a feature in today's Financial Times, which is fortunately openly available on the Website. It's an article by Michael Earl, Professor of information management at the University of Oxford, called Tantalised by the promise of wisdom. In it he notes:

Yet nearly 15 years on, the promise of knowledge management has yet to be realised. There is a dearth of outstanding success stories, where original goals were achieved or sustainable value was created.

It is not unusual to visit companies claiming knowledge management successes only to find some worthy efforts lacking any lasting impact. More often, a company has simply relabelled a new IT application as a knowledge management initiative.

In a 1998 article in the Sloan Management Review, I reported on the work of 20 chief knowledge officers at large corporations. Sceptics may not be surprised to know that most of these CKO positions no longer exist. More than half had gone within two years of our study. In other words, knowledge management is tantalising. It still appeals to many, but success is elusive. Even defining it is not easy. Perhaps this is because knowledge management is concerned with an intangible and, in some ways, invisible asset.

He describes a study of forty companies, through which seven schools of knowledge management were identified: the 'systems' school, the 'cartographic' school, the 'engineering' the 'commercial' school, the 'organisational' school, the 'spatial' school and the 'strategic' school. He also terms the first three, technology oriented and the last three, behavioural. I'll leave it to you to explore the article for the detail.

The article is relatively brief, so one does not expect close analysis of the schools; that may be in whatever paper is published on the research. However, it is notable that the first three are all, in essence, information management schools, involving databases and/or intranets, the 'commercial' school is concerned with intellectual property rights and intangible assets, and the first two 'behavioural' schools are all about sharing information within the organization, while the 'strategic school' is about defining the business as a knowledge business - which is, perhaps, closer to the 'commercial' school than to the other two 'behavioural' schools.

The reasons for the disappearance of the CKOs are interesting:

Our study of CKOs revealed broadly skilled people with loose job descriptions and CVs rich with experience. They were usually appointed by the chief executive but had to define their own role and work out the company's agenda for knowledge management. Their roles combined the skills of an entrepreneur, consultant, technologist and designer. Most did not keep their job for long, often due to a change of CEO, sometimes because an early victory was declared over knowledge management or because they were headhunted by management consultancies.

I wonder when we're going to hear about 'common-sense management'?