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Friday, May 9, 2014

Knowledge Management - The hydra-headed jargon

“Knowledge is as old as the rocks and as changing as the sea, enmeshed inextricably in its ways. And you want a clear definition of Knowledge Management? You must be daft!”
                                                                                         ~Paraphrasing Bedford in “The Quality of Travel”
One of the biggest challenges I have faced, especially facing people from a non-IT background is to explain what I do! “Knowledge Management? What exactly does that mean?” is a question I frequently encounter.  This post is a result of my quest to come up with an answer that will get me past a response that I hear “That’s very interesting”…but which I know really means “ I haven’t got a clue what you’re talking about”!!! J
The reason for this ambiguity is not very hard to understand; Knowledge Management as a term entered the lexicons only about thirty years ago.  And even when it did, it came as an offshoot of an attempt to explain other terms like “knowledge acquisition”, “knowledge-base systems”, artificial intelligence, expert systems and computer-based ontologies – sort of a “basket-term” for all of these and much more.  Early management theorists like Peter Drucker, Paul Strassman and Peter Senge contributed to the growing understanding of knowledge as a key organizational resource with Senge contributing the cultural dimension with his seminal work “The Fifth Discipline” where he introduced the concept of “the learning organization”.  By the mid-1990s the word had become pretty much part of organization strategy with important contributions from researchers like Christopher Bartlett, Dorothy Leonard-Barton, Chris Agyris, Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi…to name a few.
Knowledge Management became the new mantra for consulting companies; organizations that had not had much success with TQM and other business process re-engineering initiatives now embraced KM as the panacea for all their previous management blunders.  Along the way, the term came to acquire attributes of performance management, Quality management, Business Intelligence (the new Decision Support Systems), and what have you.
The rise of the digital age has added new flavours to knowledge management; Web 2.0 introduced social collaboration to the list of things that KM already stood for.  And with the number of social tools available in the market, and their attempts at capturing a slice of the enterprise space, Knowledge Management has never had it so good…in terms of popularity.  Never mind that people still are unable to define what it really means! J


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