Information Research Weblog

I'm off to Loughborough tomorrow to talk about 'knowledge management' - again. The one thing I get out of these events is the fact that people want to believe in km - but when asked to distinguish between 'knowledge' and 'information', fail to do so. I wonder if tomorrow will bring something new?

A good deal of the knowledge management literature actually deals with communication in organizations and it is welcome to see an item on ZDNet that deals with this in terms of communication rather than in terms of km. Collaboration: Real time, real value?, by Dan Farber, deals mainly with instant messaging, which is now available in a variety of forms for use within business, rather than across the Internet. There's also an interview with Simon Hayward of the consulancy group, Gartner, which, sad to say reveals virtually total ignorance of the way people work in offices. He tells us, for example, that a message will be 'less intrusive' than a 'phone call - exactly how is not made clear. We're also advised that messaging will increase trust! I would have thought that without trust in the first place you can't get going with messaging.

Fortunately the readers of ZDNet appear to be very well aware of the problems and limitations of the technology. For example, one correspondent on the Feedback notes something of interest against the IT hype:

I’ve worked in places that use both Outlook and Notes and at least 95% of the people used them exclusively for email. The other 5% used the calendar features occasionally. That’s a lot in licensing fees for something that could be substituted for free. It leads you to believe that before free/open source will succeed on cost alone, the decision makers have to lose their emotional attachment with some of these apps. I’ve even seen certain processes made compulsory using features in these suites, for no apparent reason other than to justify the purchase.

And another observes a core problem:

The last thing I need is more real-time interrupts during the day. As it is, my productivity is down almost half because I can't complete even a simple task before someone phones, drops by, or otherwise demands my attention. Once they're taken care of, it takes several minutes to get back into the context of what I was doing again, at which point the next interruption occurs.

and another:

Attempting to replace face to face meetings with IM is nothing but a marketing attempt by those very companies to sell more software. I don't NEED MORE INTERRUPTIONS during the day than I already get from phone and email while working.

and another:

The problem with most modern forms of communication is that you can't tell if the other person is busy. As already pointed out the business day has too many interuptions in it to begin with.

Finally, it is interesting that several of the ideas discussed here were actually incorporated into trial systems in 1985 when I was investigating the Department of Trade and Industry's 'office automation' pilots. Things don't always move rapidly in IT :-) And, you know, it might be a good idea for the vendors of these systems to check on the outcomes of those pilots - I imagine that the reason that such a time has passed before some elements reached the market is that it was found that no one wanted them!

I managed to finish off Fuller's book on the Amsterdam trip. As Elena Maceviciute said in her review in Information Research, it is an interesting work. However, its subject is not related to the current 'knowledge management' fad, but to science and science research policy and the role of universities in public policy on science research. It also takes a position on the role of scientific publication and the various alternatives that exist in a world of electronic publishing. Peer review comes in for critical comment, as does Stephen Harnad's espousal of 'e-prints' as a way of ensuring readier and open access to the scholarly literature. Fuller also pays attention to the rise of expert systems, but here his treatment is very similar to that for 'knowledge management', to which I drew attention in the earlier message. That is, he gives very little support for the statements he makes about expert systems and, at times, he is simply wrong about them - for example, he claims:

Thus, although knowledge engineers have amassed a record of designing expert systems in medicine and psychiatry just as reditable as in librarianship and engineering, computerization has made greater inroads in the latter pair of weak professional fields.

He cites a 1987 reference in support of this, but I know of no expert systems in librarianship that have made any lasting impact on the field - although attention has been devoted to the possibility, especially in relation to cataloguing. Generally, in relation to expert systems, Fuller does not give supporting references or examples - another straw man built up to support a rather weak case.

All very interesting, but the newly appointed 'knowledge manager' in industry reaching for this book to discover what he is supposed to be doing is going to be disappointed.

The graph showing the growth of the literature on knowledge management has been updated slightly by confirming that there were 145 papers with this term in the title in 2002 - that is three more than the estimate given in November, which is a pretty good error rate :-)

Prompted by Elena Maceviciute's review in Information Research, I've been reading Steve Fuller's 'Knowledge management foundations'. Anyone coming to this book expecting to find some basic guidance on how to be a knowledge manager would certainly be disappointed. In fact, Fuller is a proponent of the idea of 'social epistemology' and this volume is one of a series that deal with the nature of science and scientific research as social phenomena within a social epistemology framework.

Interestingly, the term 'social epistemology' appears to have been coined by Margaret Egan and used by Shera and Egan in a paper in Library Quarterly in 1952. One is struck by the fact that the knowledge management literature - however the term is defined - appears to completely ignore the fact that librarians and information scientists have been wrestling with the underlying concepts for a great deal longer than the information systems and computer science communities. The re-invention of techniques under different headings - classification becomes ontologies, descriptive cataloguing and indexing become metatags, and so on - is a feature of this exclusion of the LIS literature from consideration in this sphere.

However, back to Fuller: like many other authors he fails to define exactly what he means by 'knowledge management' - his book is actually about the organization of scientific research and research and development in business organizations, although he also devotes attention to the nature of academic research and the role of the university in modern society. A section in the first chapter is headed 'Knowledge and information: the great bait and switch' and the first paragraph is worth quoting:

"Knowledge" and "information" have virtually had to reverse meanings to arrive at knowledge management's baseline assumptions. This transformation has removed much of the contemplative and even ethereal quality of classical philosophical conceptions of knowledge, thereby contributing to the incisive and critical spirit of knowledge managers. But at the same time, it has introduced a coarseness into the handling of its putative object, knowledge, often by reducing it to information. This should raise the alarm for those interested in the future of organized inquiry.

Indeed! Mind you - I'm not sure where he finds the 'incisive and critical spirit' because we have a phenomenon which is occasionally found in academic writing, although every academic would deplore it in a student :-) That is, the erection of a kind of 'straw king' (rather than a mere straw man} of knowledge management where opinions, positions, critical perceptions, etc. are attributed to 'knowledge management' or 'knowledge managers', but without any attribution to sources in the literature. Everything else is referenced, but citations are generally lacking for the points of view attributed to 'knowledge management'.

So - I'm reading this in a wary fashion and I'm just over half-way through. When I make it to the end I'll post my verdict.

Tom