Knowledge Management

Context:

‘Knowledge management and knowledge databases should really be about linking people to people to serve customers, people needing expertise with people who have expertise.  They should be about connection, not collection.’ Thomas Stewart [9]

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It is increasingly recognised that traditional approaches to knowledge management have been only partially successful: there are aspects of knowledge (or knowing) which cannot be articulated and made explicit using formal methods and technology. 

Knowledge management brings together the collective ideas, knowledge and market intelligence of employees, customers and suppliers to improve an organisation’s performance.  Early methods of knowledge management focused on capturing tacit information and converting it into documents and databases which could be shared with other people.  E-mail, groupware, electronic databases, search engines and the Internet played an important role in establishing this approach; in fact, it would not have been possible without these tools.  This approach is now widely accepted and adopted in most organisations; its main aim is to improve efficiency - the right information in the right place at the right time.

More recent thinking is that knowledge is constructed through social processes and is found in the relationships between people; this idea is strengthened by the fact that people usually communicate with other people with shared interests to find knowledge, solve problems, and reach decisions, rather than turning towards documented sources.  Current methods of managing knowledge recognise the continued importance of sound information management, but are shifting the focus from a top-down, technology-driven approach to methods which enable people to learn and share knowledge in a networked environment – their aim is to foster interactive, social ties which allow the exchange of ideas and advice.

The idea that knowledge management involves connecting people to people - not only connecting people to information - questions the top-down, command-and-control concept of the organisation.  In place of the formal, vertical structure of organisational hierarchies, recent approaches rely upon informal, distributed networks which are almost always invisible to traditional arrangements, and very often operate as a counter-flow to  prescribed processes, emphasising soft techniques, such as Communities of Practice, Knowledge Cafes, and Knowledge Marketplaces and offering the potential of a ‘networked intelligence’ which disperses power and authority throughout all levels of the organisation.

Therefore:

Communicating with colleagues and friends can be the most effective way to share knowledge and develop new ideas – investigate the use of social tools and techniques, such as Communities of Practice, Knowledge Café’s and Knowledge Marketplaces.

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The first phase of knowledge management viewed the Internet principally as a means for publishing and storing information.  Web 1.0 technology, (1990 to 2000), was interactive only to the extent that somebody could navigate by clicking on links, but it wasn’t until this decade that Web 2.0 technologies - wikis, blogs, social networking applications and social bookmarking links etc - became sufficiently established to allow people to readily change the content of the web however they wished – refer to the pattern Participative Web. 

Whilst many organisations have built electronic networks and formal knowledge sharing systems, few of these systems recognise the informal, social networks which already exist; however, this situation is changing - refer to the pattern Knowledge Networks.