Also published in: Information services & use, 10(19991)1, 7-16.

What is knowledge management about?

Knowledge plays an increasingly important role in modern organisations. Business processes are complex and dynamic, manual labour is being replaced by knowledge work, requiring a high level of skills and expertise. Knowledge and skills that are of value to the organization tend to be embodied in individuals difficult to substitute. Relationships between organisations nowadays are highly intricate, the marketplace is global. The speed of transactions in the dynamic economy requires the ability to interpret and respond to information about changes in the environment almost instantaneously.  Middle management is disappearing, leaving lower levels in the organisation with higher responsibilities. The amount of knowledge available on any subject is increasing to a level that is impossible to grasp in its entirety. Finding and choosing knowledge that is of the highest value to the organization or the individual worker seems an almost impossible task. Organisations are required to apply new technologies and to innovate timely in anticipation of changes in the marketplace rather than as a reaction to business decline. Knowing when, how and what to innovate therefore is a key competence for organisations (Amidon, 1997).

To cope with these characteristics, organisations need to think about the way they acquire or create, manage and use knowledge. In a broader sense there is a need to rethink society, the economy, organisations, work, methods and systems in terms of the role and requirements of knowledge.

Knowledge management is an approach based on the central role of knowledge in organisations, with the objective to manage and support knowledge work and to maximise the added value of knowledge for the organisation (cf. Tissen, 1998). Knowledge management aims at identifying and analysing knowledge and knowledge work, and at developing procedures and systems for generating, storing, distributing and using knowledge in the organisation. As information is an appropriate vehicle for representing, storing and distributing knowledge, information and communication technologies (ICT) play an important role in developing many knowledge management applications. It is interesting to note that knowledge management marks a shift in the role of  ICT.  Initially ICT has been used for rationalising and improving well-structured administrative business processes, and this remains by far the largest application area to date. Knowledge management focuses on other application areas, aimed at supporting intellectual, knowledge-intensive work such as carried out by managers, researchers, designers, consultants, etc. Examples of these application areas are network infrastructures (Internet, intranets, extranets), document management, information storage & retrieval, datawarehousing, data mining and knowledge discovery in databases (KDD), groupware and computer supported collaborative work (CSCW), interorganisational information systems, executive information systems and expert systems.

However, knowledge management is more than just the application of ICT for managing knowledge-intensive applications. Knowledge management is predominantly a new way of thinking about modern organisations. As a discipline, knowledge management helps managers to relate all aspects of the organization to knowledge issues, answering questions such as how to support knowledge workers, how to transform knowledge into successful products and services, or how to maintain knowledge-rich relationships with the external world (e.g. customers, suppliers, shareholders, trade unions, governments or consumer groups). Perhaps the best definition of knowledge management is that essentially it is management (of knowledge intensive organisations). As almost all organisations nowadays can be characterised as knowledge intensive, one can expect the buzzword ‘knowledge management’ to disappear soon enough. What will remain is a set of new and productive concepts, work methods and technical solutions that allow organisations to operate at a higher level of intelligence than before.

The objectives of knowledge management

The objective of knowledge management is to create added value for the organisation at three distinct levels:

•         Improvement of existing business processes; cost reduction (‘what can we do better’)
•         Development of new products and services (‘what can we do more’)
•         Improving the strategic position, aimed at:

•         Developing unique knowledge
•         Applying knowledge to innovative products and services
•         Strengthening the competitive position
•         Safeguarding the organisation’s continuity
•         Improving flexibility
•         Creating an attractive work environment
•         Making the organisation independent of the individual employee’s knowledge

To whom does knowledge management belong?

Many different disciplines have joined the bandwagon of knowledge management. It is interesting to see that each of them tends to claim knowledge management for itself. Economists argue that knowledge management is all about operating in a knowledge economy, and that therefore knowledge management is the domain of the economist. But human resources professionals argue that the aim of knowledge management is to ensure that people in the organisation have the right level of knowledge and skills. They claim responsibility for knowledge management. IT-professionals and librarians also claim knowledge management for themselves. They argue that knowledge can be managed by means of storage and retrieval systems, distribution networks, etc.

Due to the fact that so many disciplines claim responsibility for knowledge management, it comes as no surprise that we see many different approaches in current practice. Examples of these are:

•         Functional approaches:

• Human resource management, aimed at hiring or training people in order to have the right knowledge and skills.

•  Library and information services, aimed at providing the required knowledge information resources and access systems.

•   Marketing & sales, aimed at acquiring external knowledge with respect to markets, customers, competitors etc.

•         Systems approaches:

• Administrative systems, aimed at extending systems to include higher level knowledge in addition to factual administrative data.

• Network services, aimed at developing an Intranet for internal knowledge access and distribution.

• Knowledge and expert systems, aimed at developing rule-based systems for automatically performing intelligent tasks (e.g. certain types of decision making).

In practice, knowledge management is supported by people working in these different areas. As a result, knowledge management can take on quite different meanings to people operating at lower levels in the organisation, depending on where (e.g. HRM, the library, marketing and sales, the computing department) in the organisation they are situated.

Fully integrated knowledge management, however, should aim at combining these different approaches, and is therefore the concern of general management. But perhaps the only people who do not claim knowledge management as belonging to their specific domain are general managers. A reason for this could be that they often tend to view management as a set of distinct functional specialisations: strategic management, financial management, marketing management, human resources management, IT-management, etc. Knowledge management at least sounds like yet another functional specialisation.

Knowledge management in the context of organisational developments

Knowledge management is the logical outcome of a number of recent developments in organisations:

• work is being substituted by more intelligent (‘type-2’) kinds of work. Well-known examples of type-2 work are the activities of managers, researchers, consultants, engineers, lawyers, policy developers, and teachers.
• Information and communication technologies traditionally have been developed for supporting or automating work processes, especially of type-1. Now the emphasis is shifting from the work process to the workplace: supporting individuals by means of generic and specialised desktop functions. In many cases this coincides with a shift towards support of type-2 work.
• Another change involves a shift from a-priori structured data to unstructured information. This also coincides with the shift from the administrative domain and type-1 work to knowledge-based, type-2 work.
• Knowledge creates power, and individuals therefore tend to keep their knowledge to themselves. However, knowledge obtains its maximum value when it is shared, i.e. when knowledge is no longer owned and protected by individuals, but by the organisation as a whole. Organisations are now also beginning to understand that people obtain knowledge through the work environment created by the organisation, and that the organisation therefore has a right to own and use knowledge held by individual employees.
• Because information systems traditionally have been developed to support well defined organisational tasks or business processes, most organisations posses numerous isolated information systems. Knowledge work typically requires information from many different sources, related to different aspects of the problem or task at hand. From a knowledge management viewpoint, therefore, a more integrated approach to information systems is required. Recent developments in information technology make this easier than it used to be. These IT-developments include relational databases, standardised retrieval languages (e.g. SQL), document management systems, text retrieval, and networks (Internet/intranet).

What do we mean by knowledge?

The term ‘knowledge management’ tends to create confusion, not only because there is no universally accepted definition, but also because it is difficult to understand what is really meant by ‘knowledge’.  Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995) have defined two kinds of knowledge found in organisations: tacit knowledge (knowledge privately held by individuals) and explicit knowledge (knowledge that is shared amongst individuals within the organization). The difference between tacit and explicit knowledge can be seen as the difference between what I know as an individual and what we know as a group of individuals working together.

It is important to understand that within the context of knowledge management, knowledge encompasses far more than factual knowledge. It includes the entire range of norms and values, opinions and attitudes, intuition and emotions, experience and skills, and expectations and ambitions that constitute our identity and personality, and that guide and define our individual and group behaviour. Knowledge management therefore has a great deal to do with managing the culture of the organisation.

Another useful distinction is that between knowledge as a concept and knowledge as an object. Knowledge as a concept refers to the way the concept of knowledge (in the broad sense described in the previous paragraph) serves as a point of departure for thinking about organisations, and helps to find new ways of structuring organisations, making sense of the environment, creating internal and external relations, developing innovative products and services, etc. Knowledge as an object refers to the fact that some forms of knowledge (the cognitive rather than the emotional) can be described, represented, categorised, stored, processed, distributed etc. Based on this distinction one can identify two types of ‘knowledge management’: management based on the concept of knowledge (and what it means for the organisation), and management of knowledge as an object (and the systems, procedures etc. required to do this).

In practice another, highly related distinction often can be found. This is a division of knowledge into two distinct worlds: the world of people and organisations, and the world of information and communication. The first world is based on a conceptual approach to knowledge; it usually is the domain of general managers and human resource managers. Important questions here include ‘how can organisational redesign improve the creation and availability of knowledge?’, ‘how can we create more knowledge intensive links to the outside world?’, ‘how can we achieve a cultural shift towards knowledge sharing?’, or ‘how can we get the right people in the right place through acquisition, hiring and training?’. One of the major issues in this world is how to move from implicit, tacit knowledge to explicit knowledge, the processes of socialisation involved in this process and the extent to which the design of the organisation contributes to its success.

The second world is based on a technological approach to knowledge as an object; it is the domain of IT-professionals, document managers and librarians. The basic issues here are capturing and managing knowledge once it has become explicit, and making it widely available throughout the organisation. A useful metaphor for this world is the publisher: the important functions are traditional publishing functions such as acquiring or producing knowledge-rich information, selection and quality control, editing and typographical design, indexing, marketing, distribution, and evaluation. What is important here is the way we organise and support this type of publishing process.

Knowledge management and information management

Information management comes in two kinds. On the one hand it can be defined as management of IT-resources, systems and services, i.e. the entire information infrastructure within the organisation. On the other hand it can be defined as management of information resources (including aspects such as creation and acquisition, storage and retrieval, distribution and archiving) within the organisation. Both types of information management would seem to have a strong relationship with the second world of  knowledge management describe in the previous section. And indeed, there even is a certain tendency in the domain of information management to believe that knowledge management and information management are more or less the same thing. As a result, managers often believe that if they have installed an intranet and a few software applications for document management and distribution, they have solved the knowledge management problem. In reality there are huge differences between infornation management and knowledge management. To grasp these differences and to move effectively from one to the other, the information professional will have to develop an entirely knew way of thinking about the role of information and IT.

Until quite recently we used the word ‘automation’ to describe the use of computers for supporting work processes. Nowadays we hardly use this word anymore. Instead, we use the phrase ‘application of information and communications technology’. The reason for this is that we no longer just use computers to take over tasks formerly performed by human beings. Computers now perform supportive tasks through information systems, i.e. they provide people with information to help them do their jobs. Another role of the computer is to connect individuals, work processes, business departments, and partners in the value chain through communication networks. Information management has as its objective to develop and organise these kinds of things, and therefore is concerned with bringing organisational design and ICT in line with each other. The main difference between traditional information management and a new role in the area of knowledge management lies in the nature of the work that is supported by IT-applications and the nature of the systems and technical resources involved.

Most current information systems are based on well-defined business processes. These processes have been analysed extensively in order to make sure that there is a one-to-one fit between the information system and the underlying business process. Such information systems are based on data: they store factual characteristics of the objects that are important to the business process. It is common practice to record many different meta-aspects of the data in the system: nature, origin and destination, who is allowed to do what, etc. This kind of system is excellent for business processes that are relatively stable, can be described unambiguously, and involve large quantities of more or less similar objects (e.g. orders, invoices, applications, etc.). Examples are most administrative, logistic and production processes.

However, knowledge work is of an entirely different nature. Here there are no well-defined work processes, but ill-defined ‘functional’ areas such as management, marketing, design, negotiation, research or consulting. Knowledge workers are confronted with situations, activities and problems which are unpredictable, unique and which escape a-priori description and analysis. Traditional information systems are of little value here, as many managers have found from their frustration with so-called management (or even ‘executive’) information systems, which in reality offer no more than administrative data at an aggregated level. The problem is that in knowledge work it is both impossible to predict information needs and to predict which knowledge might be of use at a certain time or in a certain situation. Also, the knowledge worker has little need for factual data and rather has a need for background information, analyses, opinions, argumentations, conclusions, procedures, methods, best practices, etc. It is easier to provide such knowledge-based information through documents than though a relational database system. In the domain of knowledge work, traditional information systems based on factual data linked to primary business processes are of little use.

To summarise this issue (cf table 1): traditional information management is focused on information as an object and on explicit, factual information managed through automated systems. Its object is to support internal processes and ensure the quality of business operations. Knowledge management, in its broadest sense, is focused on knowledge as a concept and on tacit knowledge embodied in individual people and in the organisation as a whole. Its primary aim is to facilitate knowledge-rich relations and to ensure ongoing development and innovation.

Table 1

Knowledge management and the information professional

Focussing on the second form of information management (cf. above), also known as ‘information resources management’ (IRM), it can be said that the information professional working in this domain is a specialist in the area of explicit, documented knowledge. It has to be clear that this is a fairly modest role in view of the wider implications of the concept of knowledge management. But it also is a useful role which offers excellent perspectives for the information professional.

Although at this stage it is difficult to define what the role of the information professional will be, in the long term, a few things already are clear. One is that the information professional will not act as a ‘knowledge intermediary’. This is because it is a fundamental principle of knowledge management to take away intermediary layers between the source and user of knowledge. It is especially important to understand that the ultimate goals is not just to provide or make available knowledge on a single item basis (i.e. to provide a knowledge item whenever required), but to create knowledge channels which allow synergy between partners leading to mutual exchange and enrichment of knowledge.  That is why, for instance, insurance companies are becoming direct writers, or publishers (and even authors) are bypassing libraries to allow end users direct access to their own digital archives.

Another issue is that new types of support are becoming important. There is little need for intermediary services and knowledge delivery because the user can do these things himself. What is more important is ‘empowerment’ of the knowledge worker through the availability of tools, systems and services which allow him or her to operate more effectively and at  a higher level of knowledge. Information professionals therefore should switch their attention to the development of support systems and services that help the user to operate better as a knowledge worker.

In relation to the ‘empowerment’ issue another point has to be raised. This is the concept of ‘sense making’ that is fundamental to knowledge management (Choo, 1998). Sense making relates to the way people and organisations interpret signals from the environment and transform these into shared knowledge and common values. At a more individual level, it relates to the way people use knowledge. Here we are not only concerned with interpreting information and constructing our views of the world, but also with just doing our work. It is a characteristic of knowledge work that the flow of thinking and activities sometimes stops. In a literal sense we do not know how to proceed, and have a need for additional knowledge which helps us to obtain a new orientation and make sense of the situation which led to the ‘cognitive block’. Providing access to information which facilitates the sense-making process, supporting exchange of information to achieve shared interpretations, and supporting the resolution of cognitive blocks in knowledge work are areas where the information professional can contribute to the broader issue of knowledge management.

In order to do this, the information professional needs to understand the role of knowledge in every area of the organisation. Therefore, understanding organisations is as useful to the information professional as understanding information and knowledge. Schools of information management should bear this in mind when developing a knowledge management oriented curriculum. Only through this type of understanding can the information professional help to integrate data, documents and personal knowledge and to create knowledge links between organisational policies, resources, activities and outcomes that help to enhance the performance of the organisation (fig. 1).

Information professional skills

There are additional skills that the information professional should develop. One is the ability to think in terms of knowledge networks:

• Internal networks

• personal networks

• project teams, competence groups, groupware

• Intranet, internal knowledge resources

• External networks

• personal networks

• customers, suppliers, partners, extranet

• Internet, external knowledge resources

The reason for this is because, as already indicated above, knowledge management is more focused on the flow and interchange of knowledge, and therefore on knowledge channels and networks, than on the management of ‘knowledge objects’ as distinct entities.

It is also useful to develop a way of thinking based on the ‘publishing metaphor’ described above. This, too, is based on the idea of knowledge flow. The publisher is far more than the librarian oriented towards the idea of a ‘knowledge chain’ which links authors with users, and through which knowledge flows from one to the other. Librarians and other information professionals tend to have a much more static perception of knowledge, based on the idea of a collection or repository and of access rather than distribution.

The information professional’s contribution to knowledge management now can be summarised in the following points:

• Organising internal ‘publishing’ function

• Organising external knowledge flows

• Empowerment of the knowledge worker

• Integration of data, documents and personal knowledge

• Linking of policies, resources, activities and outputs

Knowledge management activities for the information professional

Knowledge models

A starting point for information professionals who wish to contribute to knowledge management in their organisation is to develop a knowledge model. Knowledge models are used to describe the knowledge infrastructure of an organisation. These knowledge models consist of various elements, such as:

• A typology of knowledge objects, e.g.

• Knowledge documents

• Employees

• Projects

• Clients/contacts

• External knowledge sources
  

• A typology of knowledge work (including knowledge required and knowledge produced)
  

• Definitions, standards and management procedures for metadata
  

• Indexing standards and procedures for knowledge objects, based on a variety of approaches, e.g.:

• subject domain models

• subject descriptors (keywords, thesaurus)

• topics (clusters of knowledge objects)

• meta-characteristics
  

• Standards and procedures for storage and distribution
  

• Knowledge systems architecture

Knowledge objects

Knowledge objects are all entities that contain relevant knowledge for the organisation. Knowledge objects are often represented by specific information systems already existing within the organisation. One of the objectives of knowledge management is to enhance these existing information systems in a number of ways:

• Add knowledge-oriented attributes to existing data definitions according to knowledge metadata standards.

• Add knowledge-oriented indexing and retrieval to existing information systems

• Provide integrated access to all information systems through a uniform user interface.

The ultimate goal is to create an integrated knowledge system that will respond to a query by providing information from a variety of (internal and external) knowledge sources.

Knowledge profiles

Knowledge profiles or topics cluster various (types of) knowledge objects to support a specific knowledge activity. Examples are:

• Individual topics: cluster all knowledge that is relevant for a specific employee or, in a more generic sense, for a specific type of knowledge activity.

• Project topic: cluster all knowledge that is relevant for a project team.

• Contact topic: cluster all knowledge that is relevant in the context of knowledge exchange with external contacts.

• General topics: cluster all knowledge that is relevant for specific tasks or activities within the organisation.

Topics generate knowledge output based on using the topic as a query on one or more underlying information systems. The output can include:

• References to relevant knowledge documents

• Profiles of employees with relevant knowledge or skills

• Current or previous projects

• External knowledge resources (e.g. documents, organisations, resource persons)

• Contacts/clients for whom the knowledge may be of importance

Conclusion

Our intensive involvement with the concept of knowledge management has led to the conviction that there is once single success factor: commitment at the top managerial level of the organisation. Knowledge management is an extremely broad concept, involving almost any area and issue in the organisation. It is not imaginable that a successful, integrated approach can be achieved through a bottom-up approach. At the same time, however, there appears to be a major obstacle to knowledge management: managers. Most managers tend to either view knowledge management as a functional specialisation and to appoint a ‘knowledge manager’ in that role, or to delegate the responsibility for knowledge management to an existing functional area, usually IT. There therefore is one thing not to do as an information professional: take on responsibility for knowledge management within the organisation, beyond the boundaries of what legitimately belongs to the domain of one’s own profession. If the information professional keeps that in mind, and happens to have a responsive top management that understands its responsibilities, he or she will find exciting opportunities to contribute to the new domain of knowledge management.

References

Amidon, Debra M. (1997) – Innovation strategy for the knowledge economy. – Boston: Butterworth-Heinemann, 1997.

Choo, Chun Wei (1998) – The knowing organization: how organizations use information to construct meaning, create knowledge and make decisions. - New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Nonaka, I.; Takeuchi, H. (1995)- The knowledge-creating company: how Japanese companies create the dynamics of innovation. - Oxford University Press, 1995.

Tissen, R.; Andriessen, D.; Lekanne Deprez:, F. (1998) -  Value-based Knowledge management ; creating the 21st century company: knowledge intensive, people rich. - Addison Wesley Longman, 1998.