denotes premium content | May 23 2013 Feature
posted 1 Jun 1999 in Volume 2 Issue 9
The
future of Knowledge Management
The term knowledge management is
everywhere. Our journal was one of the first to specialise in this subject and
since then, similar specialist journals have multiplied and flooded the market.
It crops up in conferences, seminars and exhibitions. There are hundreds of KM
solutions and numerous KM consultants, so are we really in danger of flogging
the proverbial dead horse yet?According to Professor Clive Holtham, knowledge
management as a real and influencing movement within business is far from
becoming a phrase of yesterday.Phrases date when they lose their power, but
knowledge management still drives companies to instill its
philosophies.
Knowledge management (KM) would appear, on the typical life cycle of
highly publicised management innovations, to be approaching its fifth birthday.
Its birth was encouraged by the two midwives Nonaka and Takeuchi with the
publication of their 1995 book. It is therefore vulnerable to being overtaken by
the next innovation but it still has the appearance of going strongly, as
measured by conferences, books and jobs advertised with knowledge in the title
or job description.
Relatively few management innovations get past their sixth birthday, due
to the life cycle of:
 |
Enthusiastic early adaption |
| |
Moderate mass experience |
| |
Disillusion |
| |
Decline |
One clear exception has been Total Quality Management, primarily as a result of its institutionalisation e.g. via ISO9001. Some survive by reinvention at a later date. Planning, Programming, Budgeting Systems (PPBS) were being written off by the early 70's after their six years were up, but key concepts have reemerged as the Balanced Scorecard, and Enterprise Resource Planning. General Systems Theory had looked washed out by the late 1960's, but was reinvented by Peter Senge and others as 'systems thinking' and the 'learning organisation' around 1990. Knowledge Management itself was to all intents and purposes a working up of ideas advocated by Peter Drucker some forty years earlier.
Very little of the innovation life cycle is related to the underlying validity of the innovation itself. This is why I dislike the word 'fad', which denigrates the underlying value of the method. 'Innovation' is a more neutral term. Business Process Reengineering is routinely decried for 60-70% failure rates, but the gurus Hammer and Champy themselves predicted such rates. BPR is probably enjoying a more flourishing period than ever, primarily because of greater insights into how to fail and succeed. It is also as a result of all the management-fashion-conscious CEO's losing interest once it became clear they and others needed to work really hard at it. But companies now hide their BPR efforts under transformation or similar labels.
So will knowledge management become institutionalised like TQM, be derided like BPR, or just gently wither away like the 1960's innovation of management information systems? The derision route seems unlikely, as it simply hasn't had the same level of outrageous claims made for it as were made for BPR (even though in some cases it is the very same people making the claims!).
Many of the claims made for knowledge management are actually relatively modest. No one is claiming that yellow pages and directories of expertise are going to transform business overnight, so valuable though they are, they cannot fall too far in esteem if things don't work out.
The measurement of intellectual capital movement is finding some converts, especially from some audit firms anxious for new sources of revenue. But given the great problems in measuring quantitatively-based financial performance objectively, for example in relation to contentious areas such as goodwill, I can see few governments making intellectual capital measurements mandatory. Unless key stakeholders such as fund managers really want to know about the state of intellectual capital, this will continue as a valuable supplement to the annual report, but not a mandatory part of it.
One of the most striking features of knowledge management is that it has performed a terrific cross-selling job on the gently-decayed-away innovation of Management Information Systems. MIS were oversold by vendors in the pre PC, pre ERP era. But because if knowledge is a flame, then information is its fuel, interest in KM has actually brought home the essential need to improve underpinnings such as MIS.
There has been the odd software marketing personality who has proposed 'Wisdom Management Systems' as the logical successor to KM, but most of this group have now completed their medical treatment and are back at work, hopefully fully recovered.
The great strength of KM is precisely that it is an enduring feature of top class management throughout history. The explosion of software in the last 20 years has created undreamt of potential for exploiting knowledge more fully. But achieving effective KM is particularly dependent on resolving departmental/structural problems, overcoming skills and competency barriers, as well as achieving the essential underpinnings of both a sound IT infrastructure, as well as coherent information management architecture. The more that is expected from KM, the more it comes up against managers who lack the skill or will to put all these key change processes in place.
It also needs to be borne in mind that management innovations are also driven by the supply side. Unlike some other areas, there is a growing range of software that can help solve at least one part of the KM jigsaw. Long-standing vendors such as Lotus are refreshing their products, while others such as data mining vendor Integral Solutions are now taken over and we can expect to see them extended as a result. But although I envisage the software supply side as very buoyant, I cannot see the same applying for the vanilla consultants in KM. Niche consultancy players will continue to do well, but ironically the great barrage of information sharing about KM will undoubtedly erode current consultancy earnings from non-niche players. It is this group who were caught out in the early 90's by the sudden drying up of Strategic Information Systems work. As I said at the time, these consultancies needed a fresh innovation so badly, that if BPR hadn't existed, it would have needed to be invented.
From a business school perspective, we are still seeing buoyant interest in KM in executive education, in MBA interest and, certainly last year, in the number of MBA's getting jobs in KM in IT vendor work, consultancies and corporates.
The informal early warning signal of the end of an innovation is a critical high-profile article in a magazine such as the Economist. One such in 1996 served the coup de grace to BPR as an innovation that could be talked about in polite business company. None like this has yet appeared for KM.
One of the really positive factors for KM is that it hasn't been hijacked by any one group, although many have tried, nor has a new professional body been created. Existing players have extended their perspective to embrace KM, noticeably information professional bodies.
In 1997 I predicted that KM would not survive beyond the year 2000 as a management innovation. One of my arguments was that KM had attracted an unholy alliance of disparate interest groups, linked for conference and other purposes only by a thin thread of the innovation entitled KM. My prediction may have proved too gloomy. It could well be that this genetic diversity of KM could actually be a source of strength not weakness. Even if several of the alliance groups lose heart or interest, there still look likely to be a hard core of interests determined not to let their areas also wither away or become the subjects of derision.
The most promising hard core observations for me are, firstly, that niche consultants exist who really do understand knowledge management. Secondly, a good proportion of the software vendors who similarly realistically understand how far their products do (and do not) contribute to KM. Thirdly, there are the professional groups like ASLIB and the Library Association whose whole rationale has always been in KM. Even if they haven't been as slick as others in selling their case short-term, they are inevitably going to be around in the long term in some form, so have a real vested interest in the persistence of this movement within business.
Compared to my largely pessimistic view from 1997, I don t believe KM will be apparently killed off in the way BPR has been. Like BPR, widespread KM is difficult to achieve and is hard work, but immensely rewarding. For 'real' knowledge based businesses such as consultancies there is a commercial imperative to keep improving KM, especially relative to competitors. The major cause of KM failure is not, therefore, likely to be perceived weakness in its theory. It is much more likely to be the inability of organisations and their managers to practice and preach it.
Clive Holtham is Bull Information Systems Professor of Information Management, City University Business School. He can be contacted at:sf329@city.ac.uk
