Applying Knowledge Management Correctly To Your Business

By Bill Ives
Expert Author
Article Date: 2009-07-30

My fellow FastForward blogger, Paula Thornton, recently published a great post, Knowledge Must Be Applied. First she breaks down the Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom continuum. I agree with her that I have always had problems with it.

There is so much overlap here as tom Davenport also remarked as Paula quotes, "I resist making this distinction, because it's clearly imprecise…for years people have referred to data as ‘information'. Data, information, and knowledge aren't easy to separate in practice; at best you can construct a continuum of the three."

She then goes on to bring in other writers on the topic including John Tropea who looks at several writers in his post, Knowledge Management…NOT!, and concludes, you cannot "capture knowledge, as it's not possible to capture meaning, the meaning is derived by the person encountering it, all the capturing we do is simply information management." I agree and I never liked the term, knowledge management. In the early 90s we defined knowledge in terms of actionable information that provides business value or something to this effect. A person had to put the information into the useful action.

Read Paula's post as she provides more details to the argument. I agree with her last and concluding sentence, "Knowledge is something that is applied - for action - within specific contexts. This is not the realm of what is portrayed as Knowledge Management, but it something that is facilitated by Enterprise 2.0."

I first became excited about what came to be called enterprise 2.0 by its ability to realize the early vision of what was mistakenly called knowledge management.

Comments

About the Author:
Dr. Bill Ives is an independent consultant and writer who has worked with Fortune 100 companies in business uses of emerging technologies for over 20 years. For several years he led the Knowledge Management Practice for a large consulting firm.. Now he primarily helps companies with their business blogs. He is also the VP of Social Media and blogger for TVissimo, a new TV schedule search engine. Prior to consulting, Dr. Ives was a Research Associate at Harvard University exploring the effects of media on cognition. He obtained his Ph. D. in Educational Psychology from the University of Toronto. Bill can be reached at his blog: Portals and KM. He also writes for the FastForward blog and the AppGap blog.