Definitions for KM

garym — Thu, 30 Jan 2003 21:42:37 -0500

I can already hear some of the scoffing from long time collegues about this new terminology for "Knowledge Management" so I thought I might just post a quick stab at a justification for yet another 2LA...

First off, critics will point out how 'knowledge' is classically split between that which we can enumerate and that which we can predictively understand; that's simplistic, but it boils down to epistimon and gnosis as two poles of the knowledge axis. For the purposes of KM, it does not matter because the subject matter of KM is the transmission of streams of consciousness, whether it's ideas or musings or detailed recipies, and it hardly matters if the material brings only knowledge of some event (announcing a concert for example) or deep understanding of it (the post-mortem summary after the concert). In KM, both are knowledge.

Knowledge is distinct as a special kind of data because the contents are deeply human, and a special kind of communications, because the sender and receivers are both directly human. A spreadsheet or a data table is data and information, perhaps vital, but generic and impersonal. The email message about those files is knowledge. An MP3 file in a database is data, but the reputation system that successfully recommends it to me is a knowledge system.

Now, 'Management'. yes, this can mean the Dilbert micro-management of petty demigod IT depts reading your emails, but it can also mean the sense of husbandry we get from Forest Management or Money Management, ie, the process of using what you know about the whole subject ecology, about the ways and wheres the subject moves and grows, and from that applying little tweaks here and there to make it grow more effectively.

That's the sort of 'Management' I want put into KM: Knowledge Management is the means by which we build our ships to sail on this new-found sea of information, rather than leaving ourselves to flail and flounder in the waves of it.

So what is Knowledge Management? In the sense I've just described, no, it's nothing new, "Old as the Dickens" as it were. It's that change of design in a filing system which saves one half-hour a day from each of ten thousand employees ... to net a result right there of $150,000/day corporate savings. KM is the way that document was placed into the system, and how it was found, how it got from writer to reader, how the other readers helped them find it, and how it came to be a book in the first place.

KM is about how to tell which of 500 'near fit' documents might be the 'best match', for example through applying distributed (P2P-style RDF-based) reputation systems (think DayPop on the Corporate Desktop). KM is not having to read ever spam, but if a good one happens, you don't miss it because someone caught it and KM made it possible for their knowledge about the value of that knowledge to become your knowledge.

Am I making any sense?

- Internet - Comments

Definitions for KM