{"id":116,"date":"2009-02-21T01:39:02","date_gmt":"2009-02-21T05:39:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kmci.org\/alllifeisproblemsolving\/archives\/national-governmental-knowledge-management-km-adaptation-and-complexity-part-seven-comments-on-a-%e2%80%9csimple%e2%80%9d-definition\/"},"modified":"2009-02-28T13:38:30","modified_gmt":"2009-02-28T17:38:30","slug":"national-governmental-knowledge-management-km-adaptation-and-complexity-part-seven-comments-on-a-%e2%80%9csimple%e2%80%9d-definition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kmci.org\/alllifeisproblemsolving\/archives\/national-governmental-knowledge-management-km-adaptation-and-complexity-part-seven-comments-on-a-%e2%80%9csimple%e2%80%9d-definition\/","title":{"rendered":"National Governmental Knowledge Management: KM, Adaptation, and Complexity: Part Seven, Comments on A \u201cSimple\u201d Definition"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Before moving on to discussing in more detail how a National KM Center would coordinate information availability about KM and knowledge processing, I’d like to take a little time to write about a long-standing issue in KM. The issue of definition. In Part One of this series,<\/a> I defined KM as activity intended to enhance knowledge processing and then specified knowledge processing as: problem seeking, recognition, and formulation, knowledge production, and knowledge integration. But, in some circles one of the early definitions of Knowledge Management, \u201cGetting the Right Information to the Right People at the Right Time,\u201d is still current. Why not use this definition of KM for the Center? Of course, I’ll tell you why in this blog.<\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

This early definition has a deceptive simplicity about it and an apparently practical aura directing one toward action. It was very popular with consulting firms in helping them to sell Best Practices solutions to early adopters of KM in the 1990s. It’s funny though that it has seemed increasingly unsatisfactory to practitioners in Knowledge Management, and Ray Sims’s recent survey of KM definitions,<\/a> which with help from others ended with 62 distinct definitions, doesn’t contain this old saw. It’s worth asking, \u201cwhy not?\u201d Well, for some people it’s just the very bald seeming contradiction in the definition. They asked, \u201cKM is about transferring information?\u201d Why does that define KM? Why is that related to \u201cknowledge?\u201d Why isn’t that just information Management (IM)? And, if it is, why do we need to do KM anyway? If the answer is, because it’s about \u201ctransferring the right information,\u201d then the next question is: \u201cWell, what is the ‘right Information,’ and what does that have to with \u201cknowledge,\u201d and don’t you have to define that idea in order to avoid just begging the question of definition?\u201d <\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

For others looking at this popular definition, there was yet another problem. \u201cGetting the right information to the right person . . . \u201c is doing something. But why is it managing something? Why is it \u201cmanaging knowledge,\u201d rather than just transferring knowledge? I think questions of this sort persuaded the World Bank to begin talking about a \u201cknowledge sharing\u201d program, rather than a KM program. Taking the above two problems together, I think people quickly understood that \u201cGetting the right information . . . \u201c is perhaps not such a simple definition of KM at all, since it neither tells us what sort of information we ought to transfer, nor why transferring or sharing \u201cthe right information\u201d is a form of \u201cmanagement,\u201d nor in what way KM is different from IM. All it really tells us is that we need to start transferring some sort of information in order to do KM, and the inevitable response to that is \u201cwhat information?\u201d and \u201cWhy?\u201d<\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

Later on people did drift away from the good old \u201cGetting the right information . . . \u201c definition. For example, Carla O’Dell and C. Jackson Grayson<\/a> defined KM as a: \u201cConscious strategy of getting the right knowledge to the right people at the right time and helping people share and put information into action in ways that strive to improve organizational performance.\u201d (p. 6) This definition equates KM with a strategy, when it is clearly, either a discipline or a set of activities. And, while elsewhere in their book (p. 5), O’Dell and Grayson define knowledge as \u201cinformation in action.\u201d this doesn’t help very much in guiding us to what the \u201cright knowledge\u201d is, does it? <\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

In other instances, practitioners decide to just replace \u201cinformation\u201d with \u201cknowledge\u201d in the \u201cGetting the right information . . . \u201c expression, and then add: \u201cto solve problems,\u201d \u201chelp decision making,\u201d or \u201cdo the job,\u201d as the case may be. Seems simple enough, but, on the other hand, it still leaves us with two problems a) how do we distinguish the \u201cright knowledge,\u201d from other knowledge and \u201cinformation?\u201d and b) why is \u201cGetting the right knowledge to . . .\u201d \u201cmanaging\u201d knowledge, rather than just \u201ctransferring,\u201d \u201csharing,\u201d or \u201ccommunicating\u201d knowledge? <\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

So this \u201csimple\u201d definition is not only not simple, but it really doesn’t clarify the idea of \u201cKM\u201d enough to distinguish it from IM, unless we know from other considerations, how \u201cinformation\u201d may be distinguished from \u201cknowledge,\u201d and how the \u201cwrong\u201d knowledge may be distinguished from the \u201cright\u201d knowledge. So this revised definition of KM will come down to how \u201cknowledge\u201d is defined and even more to how \u201cright knowledge\u201d is defined. Neither definition is a \u201csimple\u201d matter.<\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

The really interesting thing is that if we pursue the idea of the \u201cright knowledge,\u201d a bit, we have to ask how a belief we have, or an assertion we make, becomes \u201cknowledge,\u201d and \u201cthe right knowledge.\u201d Without giving an answer to this question here, it seems clear that 1) all beliefs aren’t \u201cknowledge,\u201d and 2) all assertions aren’t \u201cknowledge.\u201d So, this raises the question of how we humans make beliefs and assertions that are \u201cknowledge\u201d and not \u201cjust information,\u201d and the further, closely related question, of how we can know that something we’ve produced or created is knowledge, and not just information? Without the ability to answer this last question, we cannot implement KM, if we define it as \u201cGetting the right knowledge to . . . \u201c, because we cannot even know if something is \u201cknowledge\u201d or not. So, it seems that defining KM this way requires us to at least understand how knowledge is made and becomes distinct from information.<\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

But, if we must go that far in implementing a First generation KM program focusing only on knowledge transfer or sharing, then what sense does it make to stop there? If to do KM, we must understand problem seeking, recognition, and formulation, and knowledge production (problem solving), in order to know what is \u201cknowledge,\u201d and what is \u201cjust information,\u201d then why not simply recognize that a First generation KM program based on \u201cGetting the right knowledge . . . \u201c is not a clean alternative that allows one to forget about problems, problem solving, and innovation, but that since it also requires knowledge of these things, we may as well pursue a version of Second Generation KM that seeks to enhance not only \u201cGetting the right knowledge . . . \u201c, but also how we make that \u201cright knowledge,\u201d in the first place.<\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

And as long as we’re at it, let’s also make that distinction between \u201cdoing\u201d and \u201cmanaging\u201d that is at the very basis of the field of Management, and say KM is not primarily about Knowledge Managers \u201cmaking knowledge\u201d or \u201cGetting the right knowledge to the right person at the right time,\u201d but rather is primarily about enhancing the ways in which knowledge workers do these things. If we do that, we in KM won’t be stepping all over the turf of other managers, who, from a point of view distinguishing managing \u201cknowledge processing,\u201d from \u201cdoing knowledge processing,\u201d are some of the primary knowledge workers part of whose job it is to actually make and integrate knowledge into organizations.<\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

Finally, to come full circle, to use a definition of KM that views it as \u201cGetting the right knowledge to the right person . . .\u201d for the National KM Center is a grave mistake, because there’s nothing in that definition that leads us to identify the \u201cright knowledge,\u201d or even \u201cknowledge\u201d as distinct from \u201cjust information. It therefore just substitutes one problem of definition for another, and leads us right back to the problem of defining \u201cknowledge.\u201d And then, if we don’t solve that problem in a satisfactory way, we’re left with a situation where someone will either have to tell us what the \u201cright knowledge\u201d is, based on their subjective judgments, or more likely, to simply avoid that difficulty by deciding that we’ll just share all the information we have with one another, and let people themselves decide what is the \u201cright knowledge\u201d for each of them.<\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

While I have nothing against this last approach, I’m afraid it’s nothing more than good old Information management, and that when some bright decision maker understands this, they will also quickly conclude that a Federal KM initiative defined in this way has nothing new to offer beyond IM, and therefore should not be supported or approved.<\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

To Be Continued<\/font><\/font><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Before moving on to discussing in more detail how a National KM Center would coordinate information availability about KM and knowledge processing, I’d like to take a little time to write about a long-standing issue in KM. The issue of definition. In Part One of this series, I defined KM as activity intended to enhance […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,7,3,8,693],"tags":[952,828,326,324,240,3530,3529,3531,52,315,56,892,893,480],"class_list":["post-116","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-epistemologyontology","category-knowledge-integration","category-knowledge-making","category-knowledge-management","category-politics","tag-952","tag-first-generation-km","tag-information-management","tag-km-definitions","tag-knowledge","tag-knowledge-integration","tag-knowledge-making","tag-knowledge-management","tag-knowledge-sharing","tag-national-km-center","tag-problem-solving","tag-right-information","tag-right-knowledge","tag-second-generation-km"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kmci.org\/alllifeisproblemsolving\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kmci.org\/alllifeisproblemsolving\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kmci.org\/alllifeisproblemsolving\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kmci.org\/alllifeisproblemsolving\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kmci.org\/alllifeisproblemsolving\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=116"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/kmci.org\/alllifeisproblemsolving\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kmci.org\/alllifeisproblemsolving\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=116"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kmci.org\/alllifeisproblemsolving\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=116"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kmci.org\/alllifeisproblemsolving\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=116"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}