Farah Piepkorn explores some of the key readings on the past, present and future of knowledge management. 

The English philosopher Francis Bacon (1561 –1626) coined the famous phrase “knowledge is power”. While in his era knowledge was only owned by church, his call to praise knowledge was accompanied by import of cheap paper from Egypt, and hence the first instance of knowledge management.  

While Bacon praised knowledge, the management of the knowledge and not the knowledge itself was what changed his society and subsequently the world. While knowledge itself can be power, one gains power by transferring the knowledge to others. In other words, transfer of knowledge and not knowledge itself is power.

Peter Drucker (1909-2005) called the next society as the “knowledge society” with knowledge being its key resource and knowledge workers its main dominant group in its workforce. (Drucker 2001[i])  Drucker envisioned the future society to be borderless (as knowledge travels faster than money), upwardly mobile (because higher education will be available to all), and potential to failure as well as success (as knowledge is available to all, everyone can produce, but not everyone will win to produce a quality product). 

While Bacon and Drucker valued knowledge as the cornerstone of a society, each had their own vision of the future of the world. Bacon saw paper as the medium/tool of choice for knowledge management while Drucker placed this value on the internet and other knowledge transfer tools. As Drucker had predicted, the knowledge society has resulted in outsourcing, off-shoring, virtual teams, globally distributed teams, and knowledge leak. Fuller views knowledge’s value in its scarcity and the more people who possess it, the less valuable it gets.[ii]

Knowledge management (KM) is the process of capturing, documenting, storing, retrieving, reusing, creating, and sharing the knowledge to increase company productivity and efficiency.  This process can be disseminated into these steps:

• Knowledge capture which involves content management and lessons learned.
• Knowledge document, store and retrieval for reuse which involves entering the captured knowledge in a retrievable repository (such as a database or competence center).
• Knowledge creation which involves activities such as project knowledge and experience or knowledge from innovation.
• Knowledge sharing which involves making the knowledge available to those who may benefit from it such as use of intranet, documenting good practices, and communities of practice.

There are two types of knowledge: tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge or information.

Tacit knowledge is the knowledge which cannot be expressed or explained easily and cannot easily be transferred to others such as wisdom or intuition. To transfer tacit knowledge from one person to another face to face interaction is the determining factor.

There are three types of tacit knowledge[iii]: 

• Core knowledge which is the basic knowledge required just to sustain the current business. This type of knowledge often creates a barrier for entry to new areas/fields.
• Advanced Knowledge – Advanced knowledge is what makes you competitively viable & gives an edge in the competition.
• Innovative Knowledge which allows you to lead the industry to an extent, which clearly differentiates it from the market. This allows an organisation/group to change the rules of the game.

Explicit knowledge can be encoded, documented, and transferred through manuals, instructions, or other means of communication such as science or engineering.

Seven Principles of People and KM by David Snowden[iv]

1. Knowledge can only be volunteered it cannot be conscripted.

2. We only know what we know when we need to know it (knowledge sharing tools are not as effective as on the job training).

3. In the context of real need few people will withhold their knowledge (unless they see a practical application to share it as knowledge hoarding is more prevalent than knowledge sharing.

4. Everything is fragmented (knowledge can be pieced together using web 2.0 tools).

5. Tolerated failure imprints learning faster and deeper than success.

6. The way we know things is not the way we report we know things (when experts describe the steps to complete a task some steps may be forgotten so the best way to transfer the knowledge is observation an actual session or taped videos).

7. We always know more than we can say, and we will always say more than we can write down (by teaching a mentee, an expert can describe the steps to complete a task repeatedly to make the tacit knowledge explicit.

KM 1.0 ... KM 2.0 … KM 3.0 One View by David Snowden[v]

KM 1.0 ... KM 2.0 … KM 3.0 Another View by David Gurteen[vi]

KM 3.0: The Future

§  Appreciative Inquiry / Appreciative Sharing of Knowledge (ASK)[vii]