I enjoyed a pleasant email exchange recently with someone who referenced an earlier (infamous?) blog posting regarding what I witnessed as the death of Knowledge Management in the U.S. Department of Defense. Without rehashing that work, I was interested to see that the post was circulating again. I’m happy to be updated on what I saw in 2009, and welcome any opportunity to update that observation.
Within the email exchange, I was asked a question – what do I see as the difference between Information Management and Knowledge Management? I thought I would share that answer here, offering it up to the gods of Google, in case I need it again someday.
The difference between IM and KM is the difference between a recipe and a chef, a map of London and a London cabbie, a book and its author. Information is in technology domain, and I include books (themselves a technology) in that description. Digitizing, subjecting to semantic analysis, etc., are things we do to information. It is folly to ever call it knowledge, because that is the domain of the brain. And knowledge is an emergent property of a decision maker – experiential, emotional framing of our mental patterns applied to circumstance and events. It propels us through decision and action, and is utterly individual, intimate and impossible to decompose because of the nature of cognitive processing. Of course, I speak here of individual knowledge.
First principles, don’t lose sight of how we process our world.
The difficulty is applying this understanding to organizational knowledge. Knowledge is only in the brain, but organizations have a shared understanding (referred to as ‘knowledge’) as well – humans gathered in groups fit themselves into artificial decision constructs (“collaboration,” “consensus”) in order to leverage the collective individual knowledge to make decisions for the group. My approach is to understand cognitive science, organizational theory, and information science to understand ways to improve group behaviors.
While we continue to put words to these distinctions http://www.fastforwardblog.com/2009/07/10/knowledge-must-be-applied/, I’ve found that it only helps us talk about it, not apply it.
In the end, all the people participating in it all really don’t care about the terms — they need to get their work done. And too often initiatives fail to start there.
I agree somewhat – and will (defensively, I admit) point out that the blog above was in response to a direct question. I continue to insist on providing the context so clients can begin by asking the right questions.
This is in tension with a preference to ‘hear the answer’ for their circumstance. Trust me, I’ve fallen on that sword so often it’s almost a comfortable position. So I take your point, the distinctions do not provide the answer for getting the work done. But the failures in this area, I fear, stem from a lack of appreciation for context. If we fail to understand the basis for how decisions are made, we will mis-apply success metrics for our initiatives.
“knowledge is an emergent property of a decision maker”…that phrase right there is gold.
I’ve always talked about his point in my blog, here’s the latest post I mentioned it in
http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2011/12/08/oh-is-that-km-is-it/
“you face a situation you may have never faced before and the nuggets in your head assemble into a new formation where you solve the problem; and now this solution is filed in your head (you never have to work it out again).
If we can get people in organisations to connect as often as they can with each other (eg. CoPs, etc…) then overtime we become more competent people…we become chefs as much as we can, rather than recipe followers.
The key point is don’t try and do KM, because you can’t, as KM is emergent…stimulate the conditions for behaviours, motivations, desires…enable an environment where people can sense-make (do their work by connecting with others), and the competencies that people develop as a result and what they leave behind for everyone else is KM.”
I also mentioned this in the KM Aus linkedin forum where they are prepping for the debate at KM Aus between Shawn Callahan and James Dellow:
http://www.linkedin.com/groups/Quick-KM-Poll-Making-tacit-77236.S.99467602?qid=f579cafc-e79e-47f2-b9a0-864a59009974&trk=group_most_popular-0-b-ttl&goback=%2Egmp_77236
” Hmmm…a given context will trigger something I know based on my experience that is valuable to someone eg. informal stuff like tips, characteristics of a client, advise on what I have done in similar situations, etc…all this dialogue can happen online as a record for others to come across.
Is this what we mean by tacit? ie. know-what
Or does tacit mean…know-how
…people being able to think like I do, approach situations and troubleshoot like I do………that’s something that takes time via observation, apprenticeship, communities of practice.
To me we have skills/capabilities/knowledge and when we approach a situation similar to a past one, previous personal knowledge comes to the foreground.
But what if the situation is not exact, but only similar to the past, or is a new situation
…then personal knowlege nuggets assemble in a formation to best approach the problem…and if successful we create a new knowledge.
The second part to me is important…the recipe follower can not deal with the deviation, whereas the person with skill and experience can tackle the situation “