Deconstructing 'Knowledge Management'
by
David Streatfield and Tom Wilson
Prologue: a fairy tale
Once upon a time there were four Goblins who were, of course, chartered
accountants. They became tired of counting hoards of gold for the Gnomes so
they sought help from the Wizard of Ecognomeics. 'We want our own treasure
chests,' they pleaded. 'That’s easy,' said the Wizard 'Human beings have the
idea that information technology will solve all their work problems. I’ll turn you
into Management Consultancy Goblins. Then you can each take one idea from
the Academic Ivory Tower and that should make you piles of gold.'
After 5,000 days the four met up at the International Goblin Warming conference
and compared experiences. 'I chose Corporate Management Information
Systems,' said Goblin 1, 'and I was selling loads of mainframes. Then the
Gnome Computers Wizard invented the personal computer and everyone started
networking instead.' Goblin 2 had taken the software route. 'My ComputerAssisted Management Systems were selling like hot cakes until somebody
noticed that they were only doing administration. Then it all went pear-shaped.'
'I chose fear,' said Goblin 3, 'All the companies were latching on to my
‘Information for Competitive Advantage’ until someone asked ‘What happens
when everyone is doing it?’'
The fourth Goblin adjusted position on his platinum toadstool, glanced at his
Cartier watch and asked, 'Have you sad Goblins ever heard of my Knowledge
Management?'
Introduction - the rise and rise of knowledge management
Is knowledge management just another fad? No, in the sense that people are trying to make
sense of the idea of managing information as a strategic resource or asset on a par with
managing people, material resources or money. Yes, in that over-simplistic use of the
concept of knowledge has led to overblown claims by IT advocates and management
consultants that all knowledge lies within the domain of the latest (or next) generation of
organisational computers.
This over-simplification is common in the UK library and information press and has resulted in
attempts to make a too-easy synthesis of the roles of information manager and knowledge
manager.1 Fortunately, there is more clarity in the body of recent US work which has
emerged in response to the ‘pre-packaged and taken-for-granted’ interpretation of knowledge
and its management by IT systems management consultants when advancing the concept.
The idea that knowledge management is just the latest management consultancy fashion
statement, following hard on the heels of Total Quality Management and Business Process
Re-engineering is quite widely perceived - even amongst some management consultants.
Speaking at the 1997 International On-Line Meeting, Clive Holtham of City University
Business School demonstrated that management consultancy fads have a duration of about
three years and forecast that knowledge management as the management elixir was likely to
follow this pattern. At the same event, David Best (then a partner in Deloitte & Touche Ross
See, for example, the publicity issued by Aslib for Sylvia Webb’s Knowledge management:
linchpin of change due for publication in September 1998; or STEWART, C. ‘Knowledge
management: building the desktop environment’ Library Association Record 100 (4) 1998,
192.
1
Consulting Group), noted that a great deal of the discussion on knowledge management
regressed into talk about traditional library and information management activities.
The Knowledge Management agenda
In presenting an overview of ‘Knowledge management in enquiring organisations’, based on a
substantial literature review, Malhotra2 characterised “most extant formulations of IT enabled
knowledge management” as ignoring humans in the process of knowledge creation.
Similarly, Davenport3 complained that the IT proponents were advancing a static syntactic
notion of knowledge and disregarding how people in organisations actually go about
acquiring, sharing and creating knowledge. Unfortunately this trend has continued 4 but the
tide appears to be turning in favour of a more holistic organisational view. This shift in view
has come about largely because IT investment as a path to organisational success has been
exposed as a chimera (notably by Paul Strassman, whose industry-wide analyses of IT
investment concluded that there is no relationship whatsoever between computer expenditure
and company performance).5
The idea of information as a resource to be managed strategically, alongside the
management of people and material resources, in not new. Management writers from
Mintzberg6 onwards have been urging Chief Executives and other senior managers to
consider organisational information more holistically. This led to exploration of a series of
useful and applicable concepts such as the ‘learning organisation’7 and the ‘know-how
company’8.
Despite these arguments, the knowledge management metaphor remains an enticing one,
whether the intention is to promote the sale of IT systems, advance the position of information
workers to the status of knowledge managers9, create a new market arena for specialist
business consultants by coupling the concept with the notion of competitive advantage 10, or
from a very different perspective, to provide more effective means of ‘managing intellectual
capital’ and creating knowledge through social interaction11 12 13 because “only human beings
can take the central role in knowledge creation”. 14
MALHOTRA, Y. ‘Knowledge management in enquiring organisations’ in Proceedings of 3rd
Americas Conference on Information Systems Indianapolis, IN, August 15-17, 1997; 293-295.
3 DAVENPORT, T.H. and PRUSAK, L. Working knowledge: how organisations manage what
they know Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press 1997.
4 See, for example, LIEBOWITZ, J. and WILCOX, L.C. (editors) Knowledge management and
its integrative elements Princetown: CRC 1997.
5 STRASSMAN, P. The squandered computer Information Economics P. 1997.
6 MINTZBERG, H. ‘Planning on the left side and managing on the right’ Harvard Business
Review July-August 1976, 49-58.
7 PEDLER, M., BOYDELL, T. and BURGOYNE, J.
The learning company Maidenhead:
McGraw-Hill 1991.
8 SVEIBY, K. E. and LLOYD, T. Managing knowhow: add value… by valuing creativity
London: Bloomsbury 1987.
9 FISHER, A. ‘Knowledge management: so what is the big fuss about?’ Library Association
Record 100 (4) April 1998 190-1.
10 Such as Andersen’s ‘Knowledge Xchange or CAP Gemini’s ‘Knowledge galaxy’.
11 SVEIBY, K.E. The new organisational wealth: managing and measuring knowledge-based
assets San Francisco, CA. Berrett-Koehler 1997.
12 SANCHEZ, R. and HEENE, A. Strategic learning and knowledge management London:
Wiley 1997.
13 STEWART, T. A. Intellectual capital: the new wealth of organisations NY: Doubleday 1997.
14 NONAKA, I. And TAKEUCHI, H. The knowledge-creating company Oxford: OUP 1995.
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The Knowledge Awareness Perspective in managing people
Since we are evidently unsympathetic to misusing the terms knowledge and management in
combination, what do we propose instead? In his seminal article ‘Deciphering the knowledge
management hype’, Malhotra15 offered his own definition:
Knowledge Management caters to the critical issues of organisational adaption,
survival and competition in face of increasingly discontinuous environmental change.
Essentially, it embodies organisational processes that seek synergistic combination of
data and information processing capacity of information technologies, and the
creative and innovative capacity of human beings.
This definition was in part advanced to challenge the inflated claims associated with new
techniques “such as datamining, intranets, videoconferencing and webcasting… as panacea
for the business challenges of the knowledge era”. It will also help as a starting point for
positioning the information professional within the knowledge management arena.
Under the general heading of knowledge management, it may be useful to distinguish
between:

the concept of knowledge as an individual or social construct (which becomes heavily
problematic if the organisation seriously sets out to ‘manage’ what is in people’s heads!);

the adaptable organisational environment in which people are encouraged to learn and to
share their knowledge; and

those aspects of organisational ‘knowledge’ or ‘intelligence’ (in the police or military
sense) that are amenable to organisation, re-engineering, planning and development.
From an organisational perspective, there is much merit in encouraging an adaptable learning
environment and in focussing on identifying and gathering organisational intelligence in a
strategic manner. There is also value to the organisation in encouraging the effective transfer
of expertise, know-how and knowledge. These ideas might be summarised as a ‘knowledge
awareness strategy’.
The essence of knowledge awareness management is that all key staff should be treated as
information managers, even if one of them assumes overall responsibility for the strategy.
This does not disqualify the information professional from taking a key role in the
organisational attempt at developing knowledge awareness strategies; nor does it assume
any pre-defined role as proper for the information professional.
The role of the Information Professional
What, then, is the role of the information professional in an organisation trying to adopt a
knowledge awareness perspective? The basic role itself is unchanged: the organisation will
still expect the information professional to acquire and organise information, make it available
for use, disseminate it and, ultimately, dispose of information resources in all media and
formats. A knowledge awareness perspective in the organisation calls for the information
professional to be more systematic in tracking existing organisational information strengths
and this will probably lead to developing new information resources relating to the available
in-house expertise.
There is, of course, nothing remotely new about tracking the expertise of staff. Organisational
skills inventories or indexes of expertise have been around for at least 35 years. 16 They now
MALHOTRA, Y. ‘Deciphering the knowledge management hype’ Journal for Quality and
Participation July/August 1998 [Special issue on Learning and Information Management].
16 See, for example, MAIZELL, R.E., et al. ‘An index of skills for research and development
personnel’ Research Management 6 (3) (1963) 209-210; BRONSTEIN, R.J. ‘Setting up a
skills inventory: how to do it on a shoestring’ Personnel (Mar/Apr 1965) 66-67.
15
appear to be making a come-back as the 'knowledge index', but, in form and intention, this is
the same entity. Other well-known tools that have prospered at various times and then either
simply entered the general toolkit or have disappeared, include the diary of conferences and
exhibitions attended by members of the organisation, with the information service taking
responsibility for storing and disseminating the materials acquired during visits.
Senior managers who take a knowledge awareness perspective will also expect their
information professionals to be proactive in gleaning organisational intelligence and to directly
serve their needs. In a recent consultancy survey of further education college principals and
their deputies17 it was possible to identify a few colleges where the senior managers were
really ‘thinking strategic’ about information. One characteristic of each of these colleges was
that they wanted their librarian/learning resources manager to be a full participant in the
senior management information exchange network that the interviews were piloting. None of
the other colleges could see any relevance in involving the librarian, whose job was defined in
terms of support for students and teaching staff. We have elsewhere noticed the tendency for
organisational information services to concentrate their active services on headquartersbased middle managers and to offer their routine dissemination activities below that level –
unless senior management insists on a more strategic focus. In the university world, for
example, a study revealed that most university librarians in the sample did not believe that the
library had a role to play in serving the management information needs of academic heads of
departments.18
How can information professionals adopt a more strategic organisational view of their work?
Again we are not considering new concepts. One way to monitor what is really happening is
through what Peters and Waterman labelled (belatedly) as ‘management by walking about’.
When one of us worked in industry he was advised by his (internationally renowned) Director
to spend a third of his time walking around the organisation talking to people about what they
were doing. Gathering information on what was going on in different departments (that
frequently did not talk to one another) paid off: on one occasion, hundreds of thousands of
pounds were saved when it was discovered that two different departments were working on
the same problem in ignorance of each other. That was in 1960 - thirty-nine years ago, when
the only computer in the company occupied the entire top floor and when knowledge
management had never been brooked! However, fully to engage with the ‘learning
organization’ requires that the librarian or information manager finds a new locus within the
organization – ideally, if the information profession is to play a full part in such an organization, he or she should be located in the Chief Executives office as one of a team of people
devoted to ensuring that external information of value to company strategy is acquired and
that systems exist to ensure that the knowledge held in people’s heads can be tapped when it
is needed. Merely to leap on the ‘knowledge management’ bandwagon without being in a
position fully to deliver will simply mean being first off the bandwagon when the management
consultancy bubble bursts.
Conclusion
“Knowledge is not a ‘thing’ that can be ‘managed’. It is a capacity of people and communities,
continuously generated and renewed in their conversation, to meet new challenges and
opportunities. People responsible for knowledge value creation can be inspired and supported,
but they cannot be ‘managed’ as people were managed in the industrial era, as mere
extensions of the machinery.”
George Por ‘Why knowledge management is an oxymoron’
Community Intelligence Labs. 1997
17
conducted for the Further Education Development Agency - details to follow
GREENE, F., LOUGHRIDGE, F.B. & WILSON, T.D. The management information needs of
academic heads of departments in universities. Sheffield: University of Sheffield, Department
of Information Studies, 1996. (BLR&D Report 6252)
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George Por’s statement cuts away the hype of the knowledge management movement and
demonstrates that the idea enshrouds two stronger concepts: the management of information
and the management of people. We cannot manage knowledge directly – we can only
manage information about the knowledge possessed by people in organisations. Even then,
the information to be managed is necessarily incomplete because the boundaries of personal
knowledge are fuzzy and continually changing as individuals get out of touch or extend their
knowledge.
Adopting a knowledge awareness strategy requires all managers to work with their staff to
ensure that people can ‘learn on the job’ and that information about their expertise and knowhow is shared. The essential role for the information professional within an organisation that
aspires to enhance its knowledge awareness is – managing information. Senior management
may ask the information professional to go further than previously in helping to encourage the
effective transfer of expertise, know-how and knowledge within the organisation but these are
not new roles for the proactive information professional.
It is thirty years since Peter Drucker19 began to write about the challenge to organisations
presented by “the knowledge economy” and it may well be claimed that we have been slow to
respond to this challenge. Enhancing the knowledge awareness perspective of an
organisation demands a shift in culture in the direction of greater openness, with the attendant
risks and costs. There is no ‘quick fix’ for the organisation: simply to proclaim the Quest for
the Knowledge Management Grail (even if this includes recruiting a Chief Knowledge Officer)
will make no difference in meeting Drucker’s challenge.
19
DRUCKER, P. The age of discontinuity: guidelines to our changing society. London:
Heinemann, 1969.