The new knowledge management - KMCI

1 June 200312special focus>the new knowledge managementThe future value of knowledge management in a corporate context is dependent on the discipline s ability to overcome many of the limitations of its current guise. Drawing on research conducted for their most recent book,Joseph M. Firestone and Mark W. McElroydiscuss eight issues that they feel will define what they call new knowledge management . What is the future of KM? If KM is tohave a future, it must give betteranswers to such fundamental questions aswhat is knowledge , what is knowledgemanagement, where does knowledge comefrom, and what roles do learning andknowledge play in business performance?We believe, also, that the new knowledgemanagement , a perspective we and othershave developed over the past few years,answers these questions well, and that thefuture of KM lies within its vision.

2 While we dlike to present a detailed description of thisperspective in this article, the broad range ofits various frameworks would greatly exceedthe space available. We ve decided, instead,to present brief discussions of eight issuesthat, based on analysis in our new book, KeyIssues in the New knowledge Management1,will be very important over the next fiveyears. We intend that these discussions willprovide some of the flavour of the new KMand our very great excitement in developingit. The issues are:!Freeing KM from the bonds of strategy;!Transcending the Nonaka and TakeuchiSECI model;!Developing the enterprise knowledge portal;!Developing a comprehensive system ofKM metrics;!Developing the open enterprise;!Creating communities of inquiry;!Developing value theory in KM;!Transcending KM standards article will briefly characterise eachissue, evaluate its importance and relate itto the future of KM.

3 But before we get to theissues, we need some background on someimportant distinctions in the new KM. First, the new KM makes a distinctionbetween knowledge management , knowledge processing (KP) and businessprocessing (BP) (see figure 1). This three-tier perspective is key to the future of KMbecause it formally specifies the role thatKM should play relative to a range ofbehaviours in organisations that shapeknowledge production and KP behaviours are always present in organisations, but with KM they can be enhanced. In fact, the new KM says that the purpose of KM is to enhanceknowledge processing, which, in turn,enhances knowledge outcomes, and BPperformance and related , the conventional practice of KM begins with the assumption thatvaluable knowledge already exists. KM is all about getting the right information to theright people at the right time.

4 Knowledgedoes not simply exist, however peoplecreate it. And KM can help them do thisbetter through its impact on knowledgemaking or new KM focuses on the whole ofknowledge processing, both knowledge inte-gration (including sharing) and knowledgeproduction. We refer to approaches to KMthat deal only with knowledge sharing andintegration as first-generation or supply-sideKM. We refer to newer approaches to KMthat deal with both knowledge integrationand knowledge making as second-generationKM, or demand and supply-side KM. Second-generation KM, or at least its new variant, provides something essential to KM. By focusing on the sub-process ofknowledge production called knowledge -claim evaluation (KCE), one can distinguishknowledge from information. Put simply, knowledge is comprised of those knowledgeclaims that survive the KCE process.

5 Otherknowledge claims are either false or just information. So a focus on knowledgeproduction and on KCE and its outcomes arekey to clearly distinguishing both knowledgefrom information and KM from informationmanagement (IM). Therefore, until andThe new knowledge managementJoseph M. Firestone is chief knowledgeofficer for Executive Information Systems andexecutive vice president, Education, Researchand Membership at the KnowledgeManagement Consortium International. Hecan be contacted at Mark McElroy is president and CEO ofMacroinnovation Associates. He can be contacted at June 200313special focus>the new knowledge managementunless we expand the scope ofKM to address knowledgeproduction and KCE, KM willbe forever seen as little morethan IM in disguise. Its valuepropositions will be discountedaccordingly. Freeing KM from the bonds of strategyIn contemporary theory andpractice, KM is subordinate tostrategy.

6 This idea is frequentlyexpressed in the form of dicta, which suggest that KMinitiatives must always bealigned with and supportstrategy and, in turn, besupported by to the new KM,however, this perspective hasthings exactly is a type ofknowledge and is itself anoutcome of knowledgeprocessing (see figure 1). If the purpose of KM is toenhance knowledge processing, then KMprecedes strategy and every other knowledgeoutcome. To argue the reverse is to grantstrategy an exception that it does notdeserve. Why should strategy be any lesssubject to knowledge -production processesthan other knowledge outcomes? We call the idea that strategy comes first the strategy exception error . If KM is to have a future, we must eliminate this error and recognise strategy as just another set of knowledge claims that flow out ofknowledge most important form of strategyaddresses an organisation s capacity tolearn and adapt.

7 Strategies come and go,but in order to survive over the long haul, thequality of an organisation s systemic capacityto learn and adapt must be high and sustain-able. This is sustainable innovation , thefundamental strategy of every organisationwishing to survive and of what currently passes for KM initiatives aligned with strategy are really IM (information- management ) projects. Their focus is on capture and delivery ofinformation required to support valid and useful, these are not KM initiatives per se. The purpose of KM is to enhance knowledge processing, which, in turn, enhances an organisation s capacity to produce strategies. It is IM thatafterwards must be aligned with and supportstrategy, not our vision of the future of KM, therewill be two kinds of strategy: knowledge -processing strategy and business-processingstrategy.

8 Today, only the latter receivesattention and KM is mistakenly seen as itsservant. Once firms rise to the challenge ofenhancing their capacity to learn and adapt,the relevance and importance of KP willcome into full view. Only then will KM berecognised as the precursor to strategy thatit is, and not its dependent the Nonaka and Takeuchi SECI modelAmong the many important implications ofthe new KM is that the still popular SECI(socialisation/externalisation/combi nation/internalisation) knowledge -conversion modelput forth by Nonaka and Takeuchi in TheKnowledge Creating Company2suffers fromat least two important limitations. First, SECIhas flaws in its psychological and cognitivetheory. It neglects to include consideration ofimplicit knowledge and in the processprovides us with an ambiguous account oftacit knowledge . As Polanyi points out, tacitknowledge consists of that which one canknow but never tell.

9 It is knowledge , as Polanyi also says,however, can be converted to explicit Nonaka and Takeuchi do not defineimplicit knowledge , even though theirdiscussion refers to similar beliefs as onetype of tacit knowledge . Had they distin-guished implicit knowledge , SECI would havedefined more modes of conversion. Thissuggests that SECI model is also fails to distinguish betweenknowledge predispositions and situationalorientations. The distinction between tacitand explicit knowledge may either be inter-preted as applying to predispositions or toorientations, or both. If it s applied to predispositions, it has no meaning becausethere are no explicit predispositions. On the other hand, if tacit knowledge isapplied to orientations, then it is clear thatmuch of the tacit knowledge referenced in examples, such as the ability to ride abicycle, doesn t fit a situational interpreta-tion of tacit knowledge , because abilitiesare , the new KM distinguishesbetween subjective knowledge in minds andobjective knowledge in artefacts.

10 This, too,materially expands the range of possibilitiesfrom which knowledge can be of just tacit, implicit and explicitbeliefs, we now have all three and bothsubjective and objective forms ofknowledge to consider. Therefore we haveup to five conversion possibilities to dealwith in considering a new model, not justtwo. This takes us from a two-by-two matrixwith four cells, to a five-by-five matrix with25 possible conversions, though closeranalysis shows only 17 viable ones. Thismeans that all those KM practices andpractitioners who have based theirknowledge conversion efforts on SECI havebeen overlooking 13 modes of , there can be no conversion of trulytacit knowledge or predispositions toexplicit knowledge . At best, those applyingSECI in this regard have been capturing implicit knowledge , not tacit knowledge . For these and other reasons we couldnot cover here, SECI must be reformulatedwith a broader, more complete conversionmodel.