Knowlede Management - What & Why ?

What is "knowledge"?
Aren’t we managing knowledge already? Well, no. In fact, most of the time we’re making a really ugly mess of managing information. In practice, the terms information and knowledge are often used interchangeably by business writers.
Let’s choose a simple working definition and get on with it:
Knowledge has two basic definitions of interest. The first pertains to a defined body of information. Depending on the definition, the body of information might consist of facts, opinions, ideas, theories, principles, and models (or other frameworks). Clearly, other categories are possible, too. Subject matter (e.g., chemistry, mathematics, etc.) is just one possibility.
Knowledge also refers to a person’s state of being with respect to some body of information. These states include ignorance, awareness, familiarity, understanding, facility, and so on.
Email from Fred Nickols, Executive Director — Strategic Planning & Management, Educational Testing Service.
There are many thoughtful and thought-provoking definitions of "knowledge" — including the important distinctions Gene Bellinger et al. make in "Data, Information, Knowledge, and Wisdom". Nevertheless, Nickols provides a good, sensible, functional definition, and it is sufficient for our purposes.
Nickols’ two kinds of knowledge parallel Michael Polanyi’s often-quoted distinction between explicit knowledge (sometimes referred to as formal knowledge), which can be articulated in language and transmitted among individuals, and tacit knowledge (also, informal knowledge), personal knowledge rooted in individual experience and involving personal belief, perspective, and values. (Polanyi, Michael. The Tacit Dimension. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. See also Karl E. Sveiby’s online description, "Tacit Knowledge."
In traditional perceptions of the role of knowledge in business organizations, tacit knowledge is often viewed as the real key to getting things done and creating new value. Not explicit knowledge. Thus we often encounter an emphasis on the "learning organization" and other approaches that stress internalization of information (through experience and action) and generation of new knowledge through managed interaction.
In the opinion of the editors of Knowledge Praxis, quibbles about fine distinctions in the meaning of knowledge are just not very important. (See Rant #1: Thinking objectively about subjective knowing) It doesn’t matter whether a written procedure or a subject matter expert provides a solution to a particular problem, as long as a positive result is achieved. However, observing how knowledge is acquired and how we can apply knowledge — whether tacit or explicit — in order to achieve a positive result that meets business requirements … that’s a different and very important issue.
Why we need knowledge management now
Why do we need to manage knowledge? Ann Macintosh of the Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute (University of Edinburgh) has written a "Position Paper on Knowledge Asset Management" that identifies some of the specific business factors, including:
Marketplaces are increasingly competitive and the rate of innovation is rising.
Reductions in staffing create a need to replace informal knowledge with formal methods.
Competitive pressures reduce the size of the work force that holds valuable business knowledge.
The amount of time available to experience and acquire knowledge has diminished.
Early retirements and increasing mobility of the work force lead to loss of knowledge.
There is a need to manage increasing complexity as small operating companies are trans-national sourcing operations.
Changes in strategic direction may result in the loss of knowledge in a specific area.
To these paraphrases of Ms. Macintosh’s observations we would add:
Most of our work is information based.
Organizations compete on the basis of knowledge.
Products and services are increasingly complex, endowing them with a significant information component.
The need for life-long learning is an inescapable reality.
In brief, knowledge and information have become the medium in which business problems occur. As a result, managing knowledge represents the primary opportunity for achieving substantial savings, significant improvements in human performance, and competitive advantage.
It’s not just a Fortune 500 business problem. Small companies need formal approaches to knowledge management even more, because they don’t have the market leverage, inertia, and resources that big companies do. They have to be much more flexible, more responsive, and more "right" (make better decisions) — because even small mistakes can be fatal to them.

Roadblocks to adoption of knowledge management solutions
There have been many roadblocks to adoption of formal knowledge management activities. In general, managing knowledge has been perceived as an unmanageable kind of problem — an implicitly human, individual activity — that was intractable with traditional management methods and technology.
We tend to treat the activities of knowledge work as necessary, but ill-defined, costs of human resources, and we treat the explicit manifestations of knowledge work as forms of publishing — as byproducts of "real" work.
As a result, the metrics associated with knowledge resources — and our ability to manage those resources in meaningful ways — have not become part of business infrastructure.
But it isn’t necessary to throw up one’s hands in despair. We do know a lot about how people learn. We know more and more about how organizations develop and use knowledge. The body of literature about managing intellectual capital is growing. We have new insights and solutions from a variety of domains and disciplines that can be applied to making knowledge work manageable and measurable. And computer technology — itself a cause of the problem — can provide new tools to make it all work.
We don’t need another "paradigm shift" (Please!), but we do have to accept that the nature of business itself has changed, in at least two important ways:
Knowledge work is fundamentally different in character from physical labor.
The knowledge worker is almost completely immersed in a computing environment. This new reality dramatically alters the methods by which we must manage, learn, represent knowledge, interact, solve problems, and act.
You can’t solve the problems of Information Age business or gain a competitive advantage simply by throwing more information and people at the problems. And you can’t solve knowledge-based problems with approaches borrowed from the product-oriented, print-based economy. Those solutions are reactive and inappropriate.
Applying technology blindly to knowledge-related business problems is a mistake, too, but the computerized business environment provides opportunities and new methods for representing "knowledge" and leveraging its value. It’s not an issue of finding the right computer interface — although that would help, too. We simply have not defined in a rigorous, clear, widely accepted way the fundamental characteristics of "knowledge" in the computing environment. (See "Cooperative development of a classification of knowledge management functions.")