Information Research Weblog

Yes, indeed, I totally agree, although I'm not much persuaded by pseudo equations, which are not generally helpful.

Nothing that I have said suggests that knowledge is the same as information and your example illustrates the point perfectly. My point is that we cannot advance our understanding so long as researchers continue to confuse the two concepts. And in most km writing, the two are totally confused. The key point, as Deming acknowledges, is that they are different and as Drucker says, 'knowledge is between two ears and only between two ears' - in order to pass on what we know to others, we have to 'inform' them. We do that by sending messages of one kind or another (spoken, written, etc.) that have the potential to inform - we speak of those messages as 'information'.

The recipient of that 'information' now has the possibility of incorporating his or her understanding of it into his or her personal knowledge of the relevant area, but the information clearly undergoes some further transformation to do that: indeed, if the 'message' is not understood correctly (i.e., as the sender intended) what the recipient is then led to believe may be false and, therefore, not 'true' knowledge. On the other hand, the recipient may interpret the information in a novel way and reach a true understanding NOT intended by the sender. In other words, 'knowledge' is always the personal construct, while 'information' is the external realisation of that construct.

If we confuse the two, we are confusing what we know with what we are able to express about what we know.

I have had a couple of e-mail conversations recently about 'the nonsense of knowledge management' and I thought that Weblog readers might appreciate them (the correspondents have given their permission for me to reproduce them). To embed the messages in the text of this entry would produce a large file, so I am trying to use an 'enclosure'. It's a while since I've done this, so I'm not sure whether it gets sent out with the message or simply appears on the site. Apologies if it is the former and too big for your mailbox.

Here's the link: http://www.free-conversant.com/irweblog/587/enclosure/km.doc

I had an interesting morning, this morning (apart from traffic problems). I'd been invited to participate at a debate at an internal research conference at Leeds Metropolitan University, so I tooled up the motorway (hence the traffic problems) to participate in a debate on 'knowledge management' with Frank Land (Professor Emeritus, London School of Economics) and Tony Bryant (Professor of Information Management, Leeds M.U.). I was there simply to restate my 'nonsense of km' position, while Frank was more concerned with the ethical issues of km, although proposing that, while km was a somewhat dubious concept, we could think of the historical 'management of knowledge' as something with a greater validity. My objection to that was that this is fine when debating the issues with lay persons and 'knowledge' practitioners, but that the information systems discipline needs firmer definition of its concepts. I think we played a draw, and at least the audience seemed to enjoy it. :-)

The idea of the debate arose out of an invitation to me from Frank to participate in a session at the HICSS Conference in Hawaii - unfortunately, much as I would like to revisit the Big Island, I lack the institutional support necessary to get me there. (LSE is rather more generous to its Emeriti than the U of Sheffield!) So, as a substitute, the debate was video-filmed and will be shown before the relevant session at HICSS - those of you who are attending can watch out for me :-)

I see that the European Commission continues its love affair with 'knowledge management' although it wisely seems to have dropped the designation 'Knowledge Society' and to have returned to its original use of 'Information Society' - since this was originally a simply re-naming and no one could tell the difference between a 'knowledge' society and an 'information' society, perhaps the shift is not suprising!

What prompts this posting is a recent note on a project called NOPIK:

The NOPIK software tool supports team-based decision making and problem solving in a virtual organisation. It can be used as an overall knowledge management tool for a whole enterprise, and it enables people to organise their own information more effectively. "We are not just talking about the environment of an ordinary complex organisation," says Francesco Molinari, NOPIK coordinator. "The tools could be used in a large virtual organisation, where people both inside and outside the organisation have a need to exchange this kind of information."

The knowledge content includes the non-textual. "Imagine your own database, with all the information it contains," continues Molinari. "When you close a file and archive it, a lot of the knowledge that was associated with that file but which was not stored within it, such as the sound of my words, the way you had an approach to me, etc., becomes forgotten. When someone else accesses the document, they don't have this associated information. The idea behind NOPIK is that software tools may help organisation and people to better recall the knowledge contained in files, documents, whatever. It could improve the content of current work through the efficient reuse of things previously done either by you or by other people within the enterprise."

You are probably as confused as I am as to what this tool does - what's the difference between a 'knowledge management tool' that 'enables people to organise their own information' and an information management tool? So I went looking for the site, only to find virtually no information there and a link to the 'Official site' that leads nowhere - well, to a virtually blank page. Looks like someone needs to get their basic information management sorted out!

On a different home page for the project, it is described rather differently - as a Case Based Reasoning tool to support problem solving - is this another case of 'knowledge management' meaning whatever you want it to mean?

Pity the poor, benighted students who are having this kind of thing thrust upon them as representing the leading edge of 'knowledge management'.

This is the latest in a series of interesting posts and articles on Knowledge Management. I agree with much of what has been expressed, but my take is a bit different. You'll find it in a series of blogs at http://radio.weblogs.com/0135950. I think your readers may be particularly interested in the posts on "Has KM Been Done?" But nearly all of the posts are critical of KM as currently practiced.

It is very interesting to see how the discussion on the non-existance of KM
is evolving.

However I would like to make a few nuances. The arguments why KM failed are
applicable on ALL other hypes.

1) not really understanding the issue and impact of the 'starters'/theory of
the hype
2) claims of other disciplines/domains of success
3) technology suppliers misusing the hype for commercial purpose

What is the sustaining aspect of Business Process Redesign (BPR)? The
arguments and theory were interesting but in reality a couple of consultants
come in your organisation, mess up your organisation, find out that it
doesn't work how they constructed it on the drawing table and leave. But
nowadays organisations are still changing their way of working and
re-inventing and improving their processes due to (f.e.) the economic
situation, and they always did and always will. Nothing new.

What is the sustaining aspect of Business Intelligence (BI)? Interesting
theory but in reality a database vendor comes in your organisation to sell
you a database (we will put everyting in and give you your market
intelligence and a competitive advantage, yeah sure...) and then leaves
because he cannot solve the problem (carbage in, carbage out he says). But
even now we need 'up to date' information on our performance and
intelligence on our markets and competitor's, we always did and always will,
nothing new.

What is the sustaining aspect of Customer Relationship Management (CRM)?
Interesting that if we know our customer and build a relationship we can
cross sell and up sell, but in reality a vendor or consultant comes in and
sell's you a database with a Call Center Script ("Can I help you with
something else than I just did? For example a car insurance sir?"). And
after a while we find out that real customer intimacy cannot be realized
over the phone or the internet. Putting time and effort in building and
maintaining a relationship with your customer is something that IS
important, but the grocer on the corner already does it over decades, he
always did and he always will. Nothing new.

The issue is that we can go on and on discussing whether KM failed or not,
but beleave me: it did not even exist. Like the other hypes it has been
misinterpreted, claimed by other domains and misused by technology vendors.
The reason why people don't share there knowledge is simple, because
knowledge is power and our organisational structures don't facilitate or
stimulate knowledge sharing. Managers still use the red pencil (cost
cutting) and look for short term solutions that are stimulating their
(financial) situation. Creating a knowledge friendly culture is a long term
project and is not interesting for managers and besides, it cannot be
measured (how can you measure a better solution based on more information?
what is the cost of a retired expert? what does re-inventing the wheel cost?
and so on). See how Anders Moberg is solving Ahold's (a large grocer with
heavy financial problems and some scandals in the past) problems in the
Netherlands : they lay off thousands of employees, sell companies and they
issue new shares/stocks. Quite knowledge friendly, what about our people are
our most important asset?

Why did this KM hype start? Because (a.o.):

- people are reinventing the wheel, (this is expensive and time consuming)
- our society is becoming more knowledge intensive (products are complexer,
time to market is shorter, the value of a company is no longer based on
tangibles but more intangibles)
- we have less people to do the work (ageing of the society)

The professor in the article has studied so called KM success stories, I
agree on the outcome but I really don't need a study to conclude the same.
What I would like to see is a study on companies that disappeared due to
lack of managing their intellectual assets. Any idea why March 1st
(consultancy firm, thousands of employees) went bankrupt in a couple of
months....? I think it would be interesting to see what the common
denominator is of organisations with success and companies with failues, it
might be how they handle information and create and maintain a knowledge
friendly culture and infrastructure...

After we are done arguing that knowledge management failed we will find out
that knowledge was important and it will always be, nothing new.

And on your last remark Tom, very funny, last week I was confronted with a
manager that stated: "Knowledge Management is gone, all the issues of the
hype are becoming 'common practice'". So common sense management here we
come!

Best regards to all!
Wido Bosch

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'?

Having recently published a new issue of Information Research, I thought it was time to find out how the ranking by 'hits per month' was standing. So here's the latest table. We see that some very recent papers appear to have struck a chord, while some of the oldest papers are still going strong.

T.D. Wilson The nonsense of knowledge management      Issue 8.1 Total hits 39553 Months active 24 Hits per month 1648.04

Terrence A. Brooks The nature of meaning in the age of Google      Issue 9.3 Total hits 5204 Months active 4 Hits per month 1301.00

Jannica Heinström Five personality dimensions and their influence on information behaviour       Issue 9.1 Total hits 9090 Months active 9 Hits per month 1010.00

P. Riding, S.P. Fowell, and P.C.M. Levy An action research approach to curriculum development      Issue 1.1 Total hits 16507 Months active 19 Hits per month 868.79

Chun Wei Choo Environmental scanning as information seeking and organizational learning      Issue 7.1 Total hits 19950 Months active 33 Hits per month 604.55

France Bouthillier and Kathleen Shearer Understanding knowledge management and information management: the need for an empirical perspective       Issue 8.1 Total hits 12594 Months active 21 Hits per month 599.71

Zita Correia and Tom Wilson Scanning the business environment for information: a grounded theory approach      Issue 2.4 Total hits 11000 Months active 19 Hits per month 578.95

Paul M. Hildreth and Chris Kimble The duality of knowledge       Issue 8.1 Total hits 11984 Months active 21 Hits per month 570.67

Kalervo Järvelin and T.D. Wilson On conceptual models for information seeking and retrieval research       Issue 9.1 Total hits 4819 Months active 9 Hits per month 535.44

Terrence A. Brooks Web search: how the Web has changed information retrieval.      Issue 8.3 Total hits 7452 Months active 15 Hits per month 496.80

V. Mistry and Bob Usherwood Total quality management, British Standard accreditation, Investors in People and academic libraries      Issue 1.3 Total hits 9414 Months active 19 Hits per month 495.47

Maija-Leena Huotari and T.D. Wilson Determining organizational information needs: the Critical Success Factors approach      Issue 6.3 Total hits 18498 Months active 39 Hits per month 474.31

Sirje Virkus Information literacy in Europe: a literature review      Issue 8.4 Total hits 5152 Months active 12 Hits per month 429.33

Kirsti Nilsen The Library Visit Study: user experiences at the virtual reference desk      Issue 9.2 Total hits 2312 Months active 6 Hits per month 385.33

Barbara Niedźwiedzka A proposed general model of information behaviour      Issue 9.1 Total hits 3021 Months active 9 Hits per month 335.67

Joyce Kirk Information in organisations: directions for information management      Issue 4.3 Total hits 20602 Months active 63 Hits per month 327.02

Leonard J. Ponzi and Michael Koenig Knowledge management: another management fad?      Issue 8.1 Total hits 6826 Months active 21 Hits per month 325.05

Shrianjani Marie (Gina) de Alwis and Susan Ellen Higgins Information as a tool for management decision making: a case study of Singapore      Issue 7.1 Total hits 10054 Months active 33 Hits per month 304.67

Wallace Koehler A longitudinal study of Web pages continued: a consideration of document persistence      Issue 9.2 Total hits 1797 Months active 6 Hits per month 299.50

Bo-Christer Björk Open access to scientific publications - an analysis of the barriers to change      Issue 9.2 Total hits 1776 Months active 6 Hits per month 296.00

It's Tom, actually, Rishi - unless you got another message from a Tony :-)

Given the situation you described, with an outsourced IT Department then it would seem that a resolution of the situation is their responsibility, not yours!

As for how you achieve full participation, once a system is designed and installed, that is down to the general management of the organization. If a system of the kind I suggested is approved, given the go-ahead, and supported by management, then management must act in ways to encourage the system's use. With a document management system in place, it would be their job, not yours, to ensure that everyone in the organization used the system in ways that enabled everyone to gain ready access to the shared files.

I see that Ernst and Young have won the Best Management of Knowledge category of the MPF 2003 European Practice Management Awards. Apparently this is "...in recognition of Ernst & Young having integrated knowledge of contacts, market and environmental trends into its planning and service delivery." You get an award for doing the obvious?

Their UK "Director of Knowledge Management " is quoted as saying:

"Today, too many Knowledge Management concepts are academic and not business led;" - I wonder where she get's that idea - there is practically no genuinely academic work on the topic, simply because there cannot be - it is intellectually empty. But she right when she says:

"...most Knowledge Management initiatives are dominated by technology and result in extremely impressive tools that no-one uses."

Although I must say that 'impressive' is not a word I would use about most of the stuff I've seen. She adds:

"In contrast, all Ernst & Young's Knowledge Management initiatives are practical. They start with a clear business need and focus on underpinning the relevant business process with content that addresses that need." "

Notice how the word 'content' is used to avoid mentioning 'information'?

My thanks to Frank Miller for drawing attention to this one.

From the sceptical side of the business, see Oskar van Rijswijk's Weblog entry. The other stuff on Oskar's log is also of general interest to IR-DISCUSSers.

agree and disagree, I will not start the discussion on knowledge as such, for this I refer to the epistemology (cartesian dichotomy between object and subject, knowledge acquisition by emperical study or by deduction, and so on), but in my opinion knowledge can be seen as content in a context, And this is where it should differ from 'pure' IR or Information Management, Knowledge Management is about sharing contextual elements. Since these contextual aspects are quite tacit, we don't know how to handle it. Ergo: tech boys call themselves KM Solutions Providers (bla bla) but in practice only come up with Content Management, old wine in new bags.

So KM vendors segue in 'content management' because they don't know how to facilitate contextual information sharing.

Or when I put it different: knowledge management is achieved through three dimensions: culture, ICT and organisation and the real challenge lies in culture and organisation and not in ICT, so KM tools don't exist.

This is actually from Wido Bosch:

The difference in a knowledge worker and a traditional worker is the main resources he or she is using to perform his or her job. Toffler wrote in 1980 a book, called "the third wave", in which he argues that we moved from the agricultural age in the industrial age and that we now are moving from an industrial age into an information age. In the industrial age the main source for a worker was his labour skills, phisical work. Of course he had to use his knowledge to perform but the physical element of his work was larger than the knowledge part, which made him easier to replace (see for this the power industrial giants had in managing their human assets). In the third wave, information age (or knowledge society as you wish), for a lot of employees the main resources for their work is their knowledge, their brains. These so called knowledge workers form the largest part of the value of the organization nowadays. In defining the value of an organization we used to sum up the assets (capital, machines, physical assets, and so on) but nowadays the organizations value is much higher but with less physical assets. Cap Gemini Ernst & Young for example is an organisation which has a high value but they have no assets (they lease everything). When their employees walk out the door at five and don't come back there is no organization left. And unfortunately a traditional worker in the sence that I mean it is easier to replace than a knowledge worker.

Last example, industrial companies are outsourcing the work which has low knowledge intesivity to countries with lower costs on loans, but they leave the knowledge intensive work in the western world. Philips is stating that they trade knowledge and not goods. Knowledge intensivity is increasing enormously. For more informatoin on knowledge workers and the shift in thinking in this area I recommend the following books: "The knowledge creating company" by Nonaka and Takeuchi, "weightless wealth" "Value based knowledge management" and "Zero space" by Tissen and research performed by Gartner, Xerox and McKinsey. The book "weightless wealth" might be a good start since it is easy to read and provides a good profound insight in the evoluating economy/society.

I agree with you that for all work, no matter how mundane, some knowledge is required but I disagree with the statement that this obviates the term knowledge worker.

I also do not think that knowledge optimalisation (or the use and sharing of knowledge) should be narrowed down as a function for HR only. Since knowledge management is about creating a culture in which people act and behave based on the fact that they recognize that sharing knowledge implies increased value adding, because sharing does not mean dividing but multiplying. If I share 1 dollar with you, we both have 50 cents, if I share my knowledge with you we both have this knowledge and I don't lose 50%. So when we create and stimulate a culture in which knowledge sharing is common and accepted, organizations can create a differential advantage. But to achieve this, new ways of organizational structure is needed. To share knowledge people need to have trust, a common goal or shared ambition, high attraction to the company, and a fitting rewarding system (amongst others..), but they way we organizate now we lack all of these aspects (due to short sighted management, rewarding systems based on hours in the office, lack of trust due to reorganizations and so on). It is in this context that I mean that we don't structure our organizations well, or in other words, we don't structure our organizations to achieve sustainable advantages.

Focussing on only staff knowledge is too narrow, since (as you state) for all work knowledge is requires, so it would be a focus which is too limited. Secondly, focussing on HR implies that they are responsible for knowledge sharing, which will lead to institutionalisation (not invented here syndrome).

When I posted this issue I was concerned on two things, the place (is IR the right platform to talk about KM) and the form (these topics require face to face conversations since there is yet no consensus on knowledge managemement and the basic assumptions and paradigms). Seen the nature of the discussion now, I assume face to face conversation would increase the benefit and seen the number of reactions (1) I feel confirmed in the fact that this topic does not fit the nature of this platform, which is IR.

In sincerely apologize for the inconvenience I caused.

Many Regards, Wido Bosch

And was in reply to:

Hello Wido,

Firstly, I was wondering if you could clarify for me the difference between a knowledge worker and a traditional worker? It seems to me that most jobs, no matter how mundane, require some knowledge to perform them, obviating the need for the term 'knowledge worker'.

I don't think there is a need to restructure organisations to make knowledge management successful. Knowledge Management (or Knowledge Optimisation as I would prefer to call it) should just happen in organisations that that are committed to a particular governance model that includes optimising the knowledge held by their staff. Ideally it would happen through the HR area, just as training usually does,

Bob Jackman

It's interesting to see how, at the technology end of the 'km' spectrum, 'knowledge management' has seamlessly segued in 'content management' or, sometimes, 'enterprise content management'. What does this mean? Two things, probably - first, the tech boys have finally figured that, in their bailiwick, 'km' brings them more scorn than cash and, secondly, that it won't be too long before the money men are asking, 'What is 'content', other than data and information?' And, before you know where we are, the next big thing will be 'information retrieval' - what comes around, goes around :-)

When the management folk take over, km jargon reaches new heights (? or should that be depths.

The km jargon splurge spills over in this one:

Law is a knowledge based profession. Knowledge management – the leveraging of your organization’s collective wisdom by creating systems and processes to support and facilitate the identification, capture, dissemination and use of your organization’s knowledge to meet your business objectives – should be key to your practice and business. However, for many lawyers, knowledge management remains a narrow theoretical concept.

Knowledge Management is a Business Imperative, By Gretta Rusanow

The 'nonsense of km' paper continues to put me in touch with interesting people - some of whom are even like-minded :-)

One such is Winfried Deijmann from the Netherlands, whose views on knowledge are presented in the basis for a presentation he gave at a Dutch km meeting. I think colleagues will find the ideas stimulating.

He also draws attention to discussions on another list, the IT Forum. Winfried's contributions to the debate on 'Learning in Open-ended Environments' along with other contributions, are relevant to our discussions. Note that the navigator button images on these pages appear to be lost, but clicking on the "x" has the same result.

I think the problem with this much repeated, so-called hierarchy, is that no one can actually find anything to do with it. It is quoted time after time, often in ways that lead one to think that the writer assumes s/he has invented it, but, in the end, the only parts of the hierarchy that have any practical significance are 'data' and 'information' - in fact, since information is so difficult to define, one could probably remove that and claim that virtually all so-called information systems are simply data processing systems. And no matter who the writer may be, once the hierarchy has been quoted, s/he gets down to the practicalities of data processing or information systems.

Bellinger, et al., who wrote this piece are a prime example of the problem - where does it lead? Nowhere as far as I can see. Or am I being too unkind?

I was forwarded the following link that deals with definitions for various KM concepts.

Data, Information, Knowledge, Understanding and Wisdom are defined separately according to Ackoff, however the author of the article below considers understanding to not be a level but the x-axis, a measuring tool that separates the other four. I didn't delve much deeper than that (and the article probably doesn't say much more than that). I didn't find anything to disagree with.

http://www.systems-thinking.org/dikw/dikw.htm

Grahame Gould has drawn my attention to some discusson on a records management list RECORDS-MANAGEMENT-UK@JISCMAIL.AC.UK, relating to the proposed British Standard on 'knowledge management'. Evidence for how much confusion there is regarding the concept is found in a statement from one Ian Brewer, a marketing manager:

"KM is more about information as an asset whereas RM is about creating a process by which you can store and retrieve information. For example, RM is simply about saying "all of our records on a specific topic are here". He adds that "a records management policy can add to an overall KM strategy".

Note that km is about "information as an asset" - now where have we heard about information being an asset to be controlled and managed in the same way as other assets? From the early days of information management of course. Just as an example, here's a title from the Proceedings of the 1984 annual conference of the ACM on The fifth generation challenge: "Treating information as an asset". 1984 you note - almost 20 years ago, and the BSI imagines it is something new?! In fact, the idea goes back to the Commission on Federal Paperwork of 1977 (which included electronic documents).

It really is astonishing, or is it? We have what appears to be a whole group of people entirely disconnected from information management or records management, who see fit to pronounce on so-called 'knowledge management' without having the slightest idea of what they are talking about. Ignorance rules these days!

There seems to be a buzz going these days on the applications of faceted classification - it's a little curious that in the days of search engines and the wide belief that they can solve all retrieval problems (even if the IR researchers do not claim this) the 'information architecture' and 'knowledge management' fraternity should be turning to a method I first learnt about almost fifty years ago. I even sat at the feet of Shiyali Ramarita Ranganathan when he made his farewell tour of library schools in the UK. We had spent two days talking with him (conversation was his teaching method - he let you learn things, rather than trying to teach you) and by the time came for him to give a public address, he had lost his voice. It was a little curious to hear the whispered words of Ranganathan repeated in a strong Scottish accent by the then Head of Department! I still have the sheet of paper upon which he wrote the Five Laws of Library Science and then signed his name in English, Hindi, Sanskrit and, I think, Tamil. I went on to teach the subject for quite a few years - including following a number of well-known British teachers to the University of Maryland for a year because the Dean, Paul Wasserman, felt that there was more to classification than the schedules of the Dewey Decimal and Library of Congress classification schemes. The students in those years - between about 1965 and 1970 - were possibly the only ones in the USA getting that treatment.

Now the Weblogs buzz with the novelty of the ideas that Ranganathan first developed in his Colon Classfication of 1933 - yup, seventy years ago.

Links to chase down:

The Knowledge Management Connection - which is very keen to tell us that faceted classification is "Not just a library science technique", almost as though that would taint it.

Ranganathan for IAs

Faceted Movable Type

Ranganathan's rigorous analysis of the principles upon which all classification is based is contained in his 'Prolegomena to library classification' - but you can find a simplified version here:

A simplified model for facet analysis - I only put this one in because I get cited :-) (Only joking)

A tribute to SR Ranganathan, the father of Indian Library Science by Eugene Garfield - who also met SRR. See also Part II of the tribute.

Was Ranganathan a Yahoo!?

Ranganthan ahead of his century.

Ranganathan and Facet Analysis - an unlikely source, perhaps, but he is creeping in all over the place.

Here's something for those who are involved in, or about to be involved in, setting up a corporate intranet. The Intranet Road Map

Thanks to Column Two for that one.

Here's a nice item from the Column Two weblog:

I just had yum-cha to celebrate a cousin's birthday. The food was good, but much better were the discussions I had with my uncle, Noel Thompson. He has been working for many years in large organisations (such as BHP and James Hardie), and has been doing a lot of thinking about leadership, innovation and business processes.

He wrote down for me on a scrap of paper what he called the Three Laws of Nonsense, as follows:

• The source of nonsense is that for every piece of nonsense there exists an irrelevant frame of reference in which the item is sensible.
• The persistance of nonsense comes from rigorous arguments from inapplicable assumptions.
• The diffusion of nonsense results from the fact that people are more specialist than problems.


These are pretty amazing rules, and I think they have a huge relevance in the field of knowledge management at the moment. Since he didn't invent the rules, I'll have to go off and do some hunting around for the original reference...

The Gurteen Knowledge Letter is a useful pointer to things that are happening around the world, if only to remind us how sloppy is the use of the English language. An example is found in a link to Stakeholder interviews as simple knowledge mapping which includes questions such as:

• What information do you rely on during a normal working day?
• Where do you obtain this information from?
• If you have a question, where do you go to find an answer?
• Which sources of news do you regularly read?

Those seem like quite ordinary 'information needs' questions to me - and quite why a selection of staff in an organization should be called 'stakeholders' escapes me.

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'! :-)

From a feature on http://www.llrx.com/

Knowledge management became a buzzword in law firms throughout the world in the 1990s. As firms learned how acquiring and leveraging knowledge effectively within client organizations contributed to their successes, many firms began to embrace KM with full force. But in the current weakened economy, law firms are cutting back on KM initiatives in order to control expenses. Despite the retreat from the knowledge management arena, many firms still recognize that KM is not just a passing trend -- it is an integral information-management tool for law firm operations now and in the future, according to a recent informal survey.

Mmmm. So km = im after all?

The author credit says: "Nina Platt is the director of library services at Faegre and Benson LLP in Minneapolis."

For some time I have been drawing attention in my quarterly Editorial to the papers with most hits. I only got round to putting counters on the papers in the first three volumes last December, so those papers have been recording hits for a shorter period of time than others. It made sense, therefore to present a list that takes this into account, so here we are. This is a list of the 'top ten' based on a ranking by 'hits per month' since a counter was attached.

Two interesting points emerge out of the exercise: first, as one might expect, the 'knowledge management' issue has an extremely well-hit set of papers, and secondly, apart from this, there are popular papers throughout the series, including one from volume 1 no. 1.

1.   The nonsense of knowledge management, by T.D. Wilson
Total hits 25.7.03 - 14790      Months counting - 9      Hits per month - 1643

2.   Web search: how the Web has changed information retrieval, by Terrence A. Brooks
Total hits 25.7.03 - 3757      Months counting - 3      Hits per month - 1252

3.   Understanding knowledge management and information management: the need for an empirical perspective, by France Bouthillier and Kathleen Shearer
Total hits 25.7.03 - 6020      Months counting - 9      Hits per month - 669

4.   The duality of knowledge, by Paul M. Hildreth and Chris Kimble
Total hits 25.7.03 - 5925      Months counting - 9      Hits per month - 658

5.   An action research approach to curriculum development, by P. Riding, S.P. Fowell, and P.C.M. Levy
Total hits 25.7.03 - 3461      Months counting - 7       Hits per month - 494

6.   Environmental scanning as information seeking and organizational learning, by Chun Wei Choo
Total hits 25.7.03 - 9399      Months counting - 21      Hits per month - 448

7.   Scanning The Business Environment For Information:A Grounded Theory Approach, Zita Correia and Tom Wilson
Total hits 25.7.03 - 2987      Months counting - 7      Hits per month - 427

8.   Student attitudes towards electronic information resources, by Kathryn Ray andJoan Day
Total hits 25.7.03 - 19714      Months counting - 54      Hits per month - 366

9.   Determining organizational information needs: the Critical Success Factors approach, by Maija-Leena Huotari and T.D. Wilson
Total hits 25.7.03 - 9232      Months counting - 27      Hits per month - 342

10.   Knowledge management: another management fad?, Leonard J. Ponzi and Michael Koenig
Total hits 25.7.03 - 3071      Months counting - 9      Hits per month - 341

Last week's issue of New Scientist (I've only just got round to reading it) drew my attention to a 'bull' eradicator from Deloitte Consulting. It's a Word add-in that will assess the bullshit rating of your prose. I haven't tried it yet, but the account made it seem promising.

My e-mail brought me a message that put me in touch with an interesting resource available at The Chalfont Project - a management consultancy outfit. On the site are some articles on various aspects of management by Dr. Leandro Herrero - readers of the pharmaceutical industry magazine SCRIP will recognize the name. I can recommend all of them as a 'good read', but readers of this Weblog may be particularly interested in Victor's leaving and his IQ goes with him

Ah well - midnight! That's enough for tonight.

En route from Sweden yesterday I picked up the FT and discovered an interesting article on management fads.

The story is summed up in the first para:

Don't look now, but the zeitgeist has changed. While the last two decades of the 20th century produced wave after wave of new management ideas - total quality management, business process re-engineering, knowledge management, e-commerce - the first few years of the new millennium have been, for want of a better word, fadless.

Interestingly, knowledge management figures not at all in the piece, apart from that mention, but it clearly fits Abrahamson's notion that a fad is associated with "emotionally charged, enthusiastic and unreasoned discourse" :-)

The paper points out that the consultancy companies are suffering currently after growing at a compound rate of 20% throughout the 80s and 90s, so perhaps km has not been the big life-safer they hoped for - signalled by its disappearance from some of their Web sites.

A worthwhile read.

The virus continues to spread and, of course, it had to happen - Weblogs are now pronounced 'knowledge management tools'.

Read all about it and try to refrain from laughing aloud.

As I understand it, Weblogs are simply compilations of messages, which have an intention to inform others, or the world at large, about matters that interest the writer. Many of the Weblog messages are simply referrals to other Weblogs or Web sites and the Weblog author may have no 'knowledge' whatsoever about the matter under discussion - s/he may simply think, this looks like an interesting site or item, I'll pass it on.

Other kinds of sites created by using Weblog software are, arguably, not Weblogs under this definition, but something else - online procedure manuals, for example. The fact that one suggestion is labelled,"The Weblog as a filing cabinet", rather makes the point.

Just found on the Web site of 'Knowledge, technology and policy' - this is their "mission":

"The Editorial Board of Knowledge, Technology & Policy is receptive to articles resting on the titular tripod. "Knowledge" means how technologies change the ways we think. Knowledge also refers to how we organize, access and use information--indeed, how we transform information into knowledge. "Policy" refers to what we should do about these things (if anything) as individuals, communities and governments."

Back to Alice through the Looking Glass?

Tom

A recent message on IR-DISCUSS mentioned the new Interim Standard on Knowledge Management from Standards Australia. By chance, I discovered that an extract from the standard is available on the Web.

This information came from the Column Two Weblog written by James Robertson. James maintains a list of such standards, which members of IR-DISCUSS and readers of the IR Weblog may find of interest.

The language of these things is truly bizarre - all resulting from an inability to distinguish effectively between 'knowledge' and 'information' and as a result of accepting Nonatka's flawed definition of 'tacit knowledge'. The fact that national standards bodies have been so infiltrated by the consultancies (BSI's standard was written, in effect, by Price Waterhouse) ought to give citizens cause for concern.

Consider, for example, this set of definitions:

1.2.1 Data

Any manifestation in the environment, including symbolic representations, that in combination may form the basis of information.

1.2.2 Information

Data in a context to which meaning has been attributed.

1.2.3 Knowledge

A body of understanding and skills that is constructed by people. Knowledge is increased through interaction with information (typically from other people).

1.2.4 Knowledge management

A multi-disciplined approach to achieving organisational objectives by making best use of knowledge. It involves the design, review and implementation of both social and technological processes to improve the application of knowledge, in the collective interest of stakeholders.

Have you stopped screaming yet?

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!