Posted by rdw on August 05, 1999 at 10:24:10:

In Reply to: History of KM? posted by steve on August 05, 1999 at 08:10:09:

Hi Steve,

I think the history of KM is intertwined with the history of IT. As soon as people started thinking about information technology ("business machines") they systematized their organization. When the computer was invented, this was a leap for mankind and for organizations. At first, these computers were not only colossal, they also were relatively inflexible and unable to change along with the environment. So there was a reason not to change (even when the environment did). The hierarchical structure of companies often was related to this period in IT development (wasn't IBM one of the most hierarchically structured companies?). When technology grew more flexible and could dynamically handle information storage, retrieval and exchange, the hierarchical nature of IT diminished somewhat.

Knowledge management is a lot more dynamic than information management, so when data were no longer just ones and zero's, but records in databases, they could be handled automatically by just looking up tuples or records, adding, deleting, moving or inserting sets of data at once from segment to segment. Hierarchical databases were (mostly) replaced by relational ones in the early 80s. Information thus grew more flexible by better datamodel design. The client-server concept also contributed a lot to this flexibilization, not to mention the intra-, extra- and Internet concepts of recent years. Now that we can all handle the data, their interrelatedness in records and even relations between records, like AI had envisioned and attempted to implement from the 50s on, we feel that knowledge is at our fingertips.

Only now it seems that we are able to understand that knowledge management has always been there, for the dynamics and complexity of data and information that our own PC's can handle, has been an organizational issue from day one. IT itself catalyzed the process by enabling its computational processes worldwide. However, communication, explicitation, exchange, storage, organization, reuse and documentation of data, information and knowledge were important before Charles Babbage, Steve Jobs or Bill Gates ever invented the computer. Knowledge architecture and core competencies may now be vogue but we share the interest with all our ancestors. The glasses we put on by introducing IT are finally polished enough to see through them and take a renewed interest in what had always been there.

Ron C. de Weijze

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• Re: History of KM? rdw 17:15:05 8/09/99 (0)

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