Knowledge management has been promoted as a valuable business concept for nearly a decade now and the level of interest in it is still high despite widespread differences of opinion about what it covers and how it should be implemented. The major reason for this popularity is that the word ‘knowledge’ is intrinsically attractive. To have knowledge, or to be seen as knowledgeable, or to have an organisation full of knowledgeable people, or even simply to be seen as an organisation that pursues knowledge, are generally regarded as good and desirable things in themselves. Everyone knows that knowledge is important even though attempts to define it precisely invariably prove elusive.

In the pursuit of knowledge management, organisations have followed a number of signposts. Here is a brief rundown on what they are and where they are pointing.

Intellectual capitalism

Let’s call them the intellectual capitalists. They have a very simple and straightforward view. If you can copyright, patent, or trademark something you can turn it into a knowledge asset. According to this very dry view, knowledge has value only when it is bound up in an artifact that you can trade. Proponents recommend that organisations take a more rigorous approach to securing their rights in law to these ‘knowledge assets’ lest their commercial value be pilfered or slip away through neglect. It is the basis of the modern commercial phenomenon of ‘merchandising’. You can’t argue with this.

This approach makes sure that you get maximum leverage from innovation, R&D, and Brand building. It is a good reminder to be rigorous about your intellectual property and not to undervalue it. The Harley-Davidson Motorcycle Company added literally tens of millions to their bottom line in the late eighties by rigorously managing what they had previously undervalued and neglected.

Document husbandry

With backgrounds in document management, librarianship, and archiving, the herders, hoarders, and husbanders of documents see these activities as the keys to managing knowledge. The logic goes like this. Documents are repositories of knowledge, or at least provide the source information for developing knowledge. To manage documents is to store them securely, organise them logically, and tag them so that you can search and find them. Therefore, to manage documents is to manage knowledge.

This is an entirely valid view. Many organisations neglect woefully the volume of written material that they generate with the result that people often act out of ignorance or duplicate work or research. When a large transport organisation in NSW implemented an electronic document management system a couple of years ago it found information on the same subject in three different locations within the organisation. All three, of course, contradicted each other, but this wasn’t a problem until then because there was no way for anyone to actually locate the information.

Knowledge sharing and caring

As wet as the previous two approaches are dry, this view argues that knowledge is something that only a person can hold. Everything else is just data or information. Citing Wittgenstein, Polyani, and Dawkin’s memes, the proponents of this take on knowledge management emphasise all things that encourage people to get together and discuss their common interests, thereby elevating their personal knowledge, know-how, expertise, and hence workaday effectiveness.

Implementation involves setting up project teams to establish such things as ‘communities of practice’, cooperative work groups, and corporate ‘yellow pages’ of people listed under categories of expertise. Much beloved of HR Departments, this approach addresses important issues of employee interaction. Many of the same issues, however, were already being addressed under the earlier ‘team-working’ banner and its initiatives.

Knowledge management via process improvement

Less precious about defining knowledge, this approach argues that knowledge can be held by an organisation as distinct from its employees. This occurs to the extent that the organisation builds capability through process improvement. Employees apply their knowledge to improving processes. These processes represent a collective capability associated with the organisation, not with particular employees. Processes therefore represent corporate knowledge. They can endure beyond the working life of particular employees, they are replicable with different groups of employees, and in some cases are seen as the particular strength of an organisation, for example, McDonalds fast-food outlet operations, or McKinseys & Co’s analytical methods.

Knowledge, in effect, becomes embedded in the process. This is not to say that individual employee knowledge is not important. On the contrary, it is arguably more important in this approach because much of it is directed at improving processes. The result is that employee knowledge is leveraged as corporate knowledge.

This approach inherits the ethos and methods of the now out-dated Total Quality Management (TQM) movement. Stripped of the strident evangelism of Deming’s rhetoric, the best of TQM fits very comfortably under the banner of Knowledge Management.

Knowledge embedding

This approach to knowledge management extends the “process improvement” view to include two additional important elements:

• Knowledge is not only embedded in processes in organisations, but also in computer systems and other mechanisms of automation.

• Documents that support processes, computer systems and other mechanisms of automation are key knowledge artifacts and act as catalysts for improving and automating processes.

The concept of knowledge being embedded in the organisation in this way aligns with the view that an organisation progresses by continually improving, re-inventing, and automating its processes, and that this not only enhances the capabilities of the organisation but also provides a stimulating environment of innovation and knowledge improvement for employees.

This approach takes much of its inspiration from Doug Engelbart’s pioneering ideas on ‘augmentation of the human intellect’. Human capability is extended and augmented by automation that is adapted to human interests, ambitions, and intuitive ways of working. Similarly, organizational capability is extended and augmented by automation that is adapted to the aims and activities of particular organisations by the people working within them.

Which path to take?

Which path to take? The answer is easy – all of them, since they all have potential to provide significant benefits. The first three approaches – ‘intellectual capitalism’, ‘document husbandry’, and ‘knowledge caring and sharing’ – are all fairly easily tackled because they incorporate the concept of ‘knowledge’ in a simple and straightforward way.

‘Knowledge management via process improvement’ and ‘Knowledge embedding’ are more challenging but the potential rewards are much higher. This applies particularly to knowledge embedding because it offers a new way of visualising the organisation as something that can continually integrate and complement human knowledge to build greater organizational knowledge and capability.