Introduction

Knowledge management as a practice has the distinction of being ubiquitous but barely understood. At its best, it is the means by which an organization becomes able to fulfil its capabilities by realizing not just what information it creates and where to find it, itself an achievement, but also how to make the best of the skills of the people who work there, through communication and sharing. But it can simply be a new name given to existing activities in IT, internal communications or information departments, without any real ambition to improve the way these departments interact with the rest of the business. Worse, it can sometimes be brought in as a new initiative without any real appetite to challenge existing ways of working, leaving the newest recruit in the business to try and encourage the company's major income-generators to work differently. The author has worked in a range of knowledge and information management roles over the past 20 years, in-house and as a consultant. He brings his experience to offer, first, an interpretation of the term ‘knowledge management’ and some of the concepts associated with it, and then some key areas of advice for anyone working in the area.

Background to knowledge management

Management

Knowledge management can seem to be the most nebulous and hazy of subjects. A whole spectrum of the organization, from the top table to the rank and file, peer suspiciously at these words, wondering if they are just yet more management gobbledegook. The term has been around long enough now and goes in and out of fashion, something to be pondered when all is well within the organization, but to be discarded when times are hard.

The knowledge management community does not always help itself with self-promotion, arguing among itself, in a how many angels on the head of a pin way, about what knowledge actually is, and how it can be described.

So perhaps let us start with the second of the terms, ‘management’. Everyone who has ever had a job understands that. It is about being told what to do, when to do it and how to do it. There is an element of human interaction and emotion in there as well. There are ways and ways of telling and of doing.