Foreword: The Generations of Knowledge Management
Sometime in the early 1990s, the idea caught on in several organizations that it was actually possible to do something about knowledge in their organizations. The “something” that could be done was often hotly debated among the knowledge practitioners, consultants, academics, and internally competing functions. However, a general consensus emerged by the middle of the decade that could be summarized in this way:
• Knowledge in organizations is most likely to be found in existing or emergent documents.
• The key to managing these documents are better systems—either technology systems or cleverer taxonomies.
• Incentives can easily be developed to encourage the production and use of these documents.
• All of these activities can be measured for their effectiveness within the organization and their costs can be justified this way.
• Knowledge was the result of individual action and thinking and the individual is the most efficient unit of analysis for working with knowledge in the firm.
• Knowledge management projects had a very strong technological component.
These general ideas were termed knowledge management (KM) by many (including myself, alas), and by 1995 these ideas had taken hold and much effort and expenditures were being burned up in putting them into practice. Ideas have consequences and these surely did as knowledge practitioners, consultants, and technology vendors all jumped on the KM bandwagon to implement these systems.
Unfortunately, the ideas were flawed. They were not so much wrong as misguided in their approach. Since almost all new movements build on the skeletons of earlier movements, KM looked very much like information management, and, not surprisingly, the results produced by these new KM projects were quite similar to earlier KM projects—disappointing the knowledge advocates and especially the users and clients who were expecting great things from the more effective use of knowledge within the organization.
However, rather then admitting defeat and leaving the field, practitioners rethought many of their assumptions and came up, again with the help of consultants and academics, with some new working hypotheses that seemed much closer to the reality of how knowledge actually works in organizations.
Needless to say, this was not the case for all KM projects. Many stuck with the old models and some still do. But it can be fairly said that these retro efforts almost all became absorbed into more traditional information technology projects and lost their focus and user enthusiasm. They are still fading from sight.
What were some of these new assumptions?
• Knowledge can be best understood as a social phenomenon, and efforts to work with it are better structured as some group effort than by individuals.
• Working with knowledge needs some mixture or combination of technology, strategy, human capital, and social capital approaches.
• It is almost impossible to effectively measure knowledge, and it is not worth the effort to do so.
• A holistic approach is therefore called for—difficult as this may be to formulate and implement.
Luckily for practitioners, there are more than a few people who are offering guides on how to go about doing this. This book you are reading represents one of the clearest and most comprehensive attempts at getting one’s hands around this most elusive and valuable resource: organizational knowledge.
Frank Leistner is a true hybrid: a practitioner who has read all the important texts and has thought long and hard about how to go about working with knowledge. He has had the good fortune to have worked for an organization that believes both in using knowledge well and in developing new knowledge. Frank has seen his ideas put into action and has had been able to evaluate them in practice. His ideas are holistic, comprehensive, and, most important, grounded in practice.
All readers should be able to make use of these ideas and continue on the journey of making better use of what we know and how we can know new things.
Visiting Professor
Copenhagen Business School
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