Part I - State of KM: Growing but lacking agreement

BELIEF THAT interest in knowledge management (KM) is declining is belied by the results of Bain and Company’s worldwide surveys of large, medium, and small enterprises. The surveys report on the frequency of use of the top 25 KM tools by management. The 2007 report covering the 2006 survey provides the following percentage use and rank results over time: 1996, 28 per cent, 21st; 1997, 30 per cent, 21st; 1999, 33 per cent, 23rd; 2000, 32 per cent, 19th; 2002, 62 per cent, 15th; 2004, 54 per cent, 15th; and 2006, 69 per cent, 8th.
If these results are to be taken at face value, they suggest that after a period in which interest in KM declined somewhat, there has been a substantial renewal and expansion of worldwide interest amongst enterprises of all types. But, in the face of this increasing interest, KM, as a discipline, is – it is fair to say – in a mess.
First, there’s the problem of lack of agreement on what KM is. It’s not just that all people who ‘practice KM’ don’t agree on what they mean by the term, but, rather, that there are many different definitions and views of KM in use. In fact, at this writing, an ActKM group correspondent reports that at a recent session of the Gurteen Café, the Adelaide group concluded KM “was whatever it meant to you,” an indication of the current conceptual anarchy if there ever were one.
The lack of agreement on the definition and use of ‘KM’ suggests four possibilities:

People can be doing KM and calling it KM;
People can be doing KM and calling it something else;
People can be doing non-KM and calling it KM; or
People can be doing non-KM and calling it non-KM.

The first and fourth are no problem if you want to evaluate KM, but with no agreement on what KM is, the second and third introduce serious ‘noise’ for anyone interested in getting a general idea about KM’s effectiveness. And the more such mis-labeling occurs, the greater the error introduced into KM’s track record. Even if there are cases of correctly labeled success or failure, the ‘noise’ introduced by linguistic chaos overwhelms the real track record, and prevents us from getting at the truth of KM’s overall effectiveness.
Second, there is also no agreement in KM on what we mean by ‘knowledge’. But there evidently is agreement among many that this disagreement doesn’t matter enough to spend much time or effort developing a theory of knowledge that can survive criticism, testing and evaluation. Many also think one can be successful in knowledge management without such a theory. But can we?
Those who advocate this position frequently appeal to experience, action, and practice, and think they can practice successfully without a framework that relates KM, learning, knowledge, integration, impact and results. To them I say practice all you want, but if your results don’t include successful illustrations of how KM upgrades knowledge processing, which in turn improves the quality of knowledge, which in its turn enhances the quality of business processes and outcomes, then who will credit the results you report?

Joe Firestone will continue his thoughts with commentary on the lack of agreement on ‘knowledge processing’ and ‘knowledge metrics’ in Part II, Thought Leader in the February 2008 issue of Inside Knowledge. Firestone is managing director and CEO of Knowledge Management Consortium International, US (www.kmci.org). You may contact him at eisai@comcast.net.