“knowledge management cannot be taken literally”…only the problem is that we’re not there to manage the context or the understanding. The words have to carry the meaning on their own…and they don’t.

I’m totally with you on the intent. But is the message carrying the intent? I’d say no.

I will think that knowledge management cannot be taken literally. Just as resource management – when we assign people to certain tasks or team, we are merely directing them and not managing them. we cannot determine if they will do things the way we intend them to, but what’s important is the result.

For KM, what’s key is to create that environment where knowledge processes can flourish. This is important and I’m not too hard up if knowledge management is going to be called something else tomorrow as long as the fundamentals is preserved.

Knowledge is contextual. Since I wrote this, I was impressed by more recent comments that suggested it’s not about knowledge at all, but “knowing” — that’s how fleeting the ’state’ of knowledge is.

David Phipps

- Arjun

KM doesn’t need to be 2.anything, though, because the foundation of knowledge management is sharing and making it free. We might be looking toward Web 2.0 technologies and social computing to facilitate the sharing, and be pushing organisations toward business 2.0 and enterprise 2.0, but surely KM is still just KM.

M

I much appreciate Walter’s clarification (I’m the one who is usually mistaken in my terseness — and my liberal use of quotes!). But in an offline exchange I thought that similar words he offered, stated differently, were equally as valuable:

Walter: “The contextual aspect of knowledge is why traditional architecting definitions of a Capability are more than Technology (e.g., People, Process, and Technology)…..they implicitly recognize that any non-trivial Capability has a People component that provides key “tacit” knowledge (again, Nonaka’s definition is problematic, since some of this “tacit” knowledge is so contextual it will never be feasible to make it explicit).

Another way of looking at this is that knowledge governs decision-making/action in a given context…to put it another way, knowledge models a context. Data/info fuels the model, but does not make decisions or take actions. Only the most trivial contexts can be completely automated, and therefore managed (in the traditional sense of planning, organizing, controlling, directing, provisioning, etc.). How useful the various semantic-oriented efforts (to model context) will be remains to be seen.

Again, if you’re not familiar w/ Snowden’s critique, it’s worth running down. A key part of his critique is that traditional KM does NOT emphasize context, and is therefore not really about managing knowledge; it’s about managing information.

To the degree KM is about Knowledge, it ceases to be about Management.