"The focus of Knowledge Management is on 'doing the right thing' instead of 'doing things right'. It provides a framework within which the organization views all its processes as knowledge processes and all business processes involve creation, dissemination and application of knowledge towards organizational sustenance and survival".
Knowledge Management is a new branch of management for achieving breakthrough business performance through the synergy of people, processes, and technology. Its focus is on the management of change, uncertainty, and complexity. It evolved from the need for advancing beyond the failing paradigm of Information Technology Management that accounts for 70%-80% system failures. As 'IT' becomes more of a commodity and endowed with more complex 'potential' capabilities, there is need for re-focusing on strategic execution. As we transition from an era of information scarcity to information glut, there is need for re-focusing on human sense-making processes underlying decisions, choices, and performance. In this new paradigm for increasingly uncertain and complex business environments, dynamically evolving performance outcomes are the key drivers of how 'smart minds' use 'smart technologies' to leverage strategic opportunities and challenges.
Knowledge management is such a preposterous, pretentious and profoundly oxymoronic phrase that many of those who really understand KM--including some of the field's pioneers--refuse to use the term. If there is anything that those experts do agree on, it's that knowledge management is not about managing people in any traditional sense. Nor is knowledge management really about managing knowledge. They prefer terms such as knowledge-sharing, information systems, organizational learning, intellectual asset management, performance enhancement or gardening.
Just to get it out of the way, let's borrow a definition from a book I'm collaborating on: "Knowledge management is the practice of harnessing and exploiting intellectual capital to gain competitive advantage and customer commitment through efficiency, innovation and faster and more effective decision-making."
"Knowledge Management caters to the critical issues of organizational adaptation, survival, and competence in face of increasingly discontinuous environmental change. Essentially, it embodies organizational processes that seek synergistic combination of data and information processing capacity of information technologies, and the creative and innovative capacity of human beings".
Clearly the goal of knowledge management is sustained individual and business performance through ongoing learning, unlearning, and adaptation. Technologies of computing have inherent limitations. They have difficulty in generating meaningful insights from data as they can’t question or re-interpret their programmed logic and assumptions. Given inherent limitations of the technologies of computing, human users of such 'systems' have at least an equally important role in knowledge management.
KM is such an eclectic discipline that no one could accumulate the necessary academic credentials and still have time for even a pilot implementation before mandatory retirement. You would need advanced degrees in cognitive and behavioral psychology, graduate philosophy seminars from ethics to existentialism and field studies in cultural anthropology and industrial archeology. Elective courses would include public history, library science, computer programming, artificial intelligence, information architecture, complex adaptive systems, statistics and economics. On top of that you could throw in business and management courses, but they would only count if you failed them.
Lessons learned from the world's greatest organizations show that even simple technologies can generate great performance when empowered by smart minds of motivated and committed humans. Conversely, 'intelligent' technologies may produce dumb results if those smarts are missing as evident from the cases of companies once considered great in the past era. Importantly, unless data and information are translated into 'meaningful' decisions and actions for sustained performance, there is no point of the whole exercise. Whether you call it knowledge management, wisdom management, creativity management, or something else!
