Posted by Yogesh Malhotra on June 19, 1997 at 19:21:58:

In Reply to: Is Knowledge Management a Science? posted by D Mezei on June 19, 1997 at 16:42:35:

Don,

The current state of KM may be described in terms of various people using lenses of different colors and 'cuts' to see, understand and describe whatever they see from their view. Therefore, I think any description of KM has embedded in it the key assumptions of the person or the discipline that is describing KM. Hence, Accountants and Finance folks would see KM in the terms of finance and accounting terms of knowledge capital, intangible assets, etc. and have even been trying to account for such assets and liabilities on the company balance sheets. Similarly, Librarians would see KM as referring to management of documents and attempting to devise the best ways to categorize and catalog the information therein. Many Information Technologists tend to define KM in terms of either AI, expert systems, or technology-enabled organizational memories that can capture and retain organizational knowledge.

My view of KM is more in terms of organizational strategy and change management attempting to overcome the limitations of IT by seeking synergy of technological capabilities of data and information processing with innovative and creative capacity of human beings.

Hence, whatever the field of 'KM' is... it is very much in a flux. Furthermore, given the 'bandwagon effect' we would see a lot of initiatives that were previously going under the labels of BPR or Organizational Learning now being re-labelled as KM initiatives... one can already see this process in the 'repackaging' of whatever is out there under the label of KM.

Yes, it is chaos all around... take your pick... over so many decades we still have been trying to define a common paradigm of 'information' and 'management' yet we don't seem to have much of a consensus on those... some may argue that management is both a science and an art... similarly there is a decades old debate going on about the information theory view of 'information'... well we now have a new condiment in this soup of jargon... hopefully some of the 'schools' of KM would contribute in some way to the human, organizational and societal progress... and finally there may be a consensus on what is KM... until the cycle starts all over again under some new 'label.'

- Yogesh

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