background of important practical and scientific knowledge
management dilemmas
The previous discussion and arguments by Earl (2001) who presents various ‘knowledge management schools’, illustrate that this field of study constitutes a variety of perspectives and practices. Each deals with certain issues while ignoring others (Despres & Chauvel, 2000). However, in the literature, there is consent that in the field of knowledge management a shift has taken place.
Originally, there was the philosophical perspective that focuses on the entity of knowledge. This was followed by a perspective referred to as ‘hard’, ‘cognitivist’ (Krogh, 1998) or ‘technocratic’ (Earl, 2001) in which technology, IT and computer- systems dominate. This phase, that regards knowledge as predominantly explicit and capable of being ‘engineered’ as a process, encoded, mapped, stored and easily transmittable, has lost support. Various authors such as Krogh et al. (2001), Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995), or Sveiby (1997) have scrutinized this information-perspective. They emphasise that knowledge management ought to be seen as a perspective on strategy and innovation. Swan and Newell (2000) argue that solely relying on IT may reinforce existing boundaries with ‘electronic fences’ and fuel ‘turf-wars’ across social groups. Hence, these authors point out that IT is important merely as an enabler and that it should only play a supportive role because a knowledge management strategy will never and can never succeed if based solely on technology (Call, 2005; Davidson & Voss, 2002; Scholl et al., 2004). This is because technology is helpful only for parts of the knowledge-sharing spectrum, foremost for transferring and diffusing explicit knowledge (Nonaka & Toyama, 2003). Much of learning and knowledge sharing depends on people and on their tacit knowledge and takes place by social interaction, mostly in informal settings (Pfeffer & Sutton, 1999; Sveiby, 1997; Zack, 1999b). It also has been realized that decision making is often based on intuition rather than on deliberate and systematic reasoning (Wiig, 1999a). Numerous outcomes from previous research show that technological approaches make only a minor contribution to the success of knowledge management. Swan and Newell (2000) suggest that there has been a lack of proof that investment in IT and firm performance are correlated. During the first generation of knowledge management in the 1990s, the whole bandwidth of knowledge was not grasped in its entity because it was predominantly regarded as a commodity and put on par with information or data. The concept of knowledge management was mistakenly used to portray the storage and retrieval of information (Salojärvi et al., 2005) and it was believed that IT and sophisticated information management techniques were the core of knowledge management and would offer the suitable answers (Davidson & Voss, 2002; Scholl et al., 2004). Nowadays, it is clear that no investment in IT is of any value without a cooperative culture that promotes the sharing of knowledge (McKinlay, 2005; Sveiby, 2001). In the last few years, knowledge management theorists
“have gone back to the caves. That is, they have become less enamored of technology and have rediscovered the value of our humanity. Although our archives are computers
rather than cave walls, modern people are like the cave dwellers in certain important respects. We still love stories and learning in communities; we still want to establish trust before conveying information; we still crave experience-based, proven and practical knowledge” (Hammer, Leonard & Davenport, 2004, p. 16).
Consequently, various recent authors point to the growing importance of behavioural science approaches that focus on human factors.
Nowadays, knowledge management is regarded overwhelmingly a cultural endeavour (Call, 2005; Davidson & Voss, 2002; Edwards, Handzic, Carlsson & Nissen, 2003; Scholl et al., 2004). It has been realized that knowledge management is more than just another IT application (Earl, 2001) and that technology alone cannot deliver the promises and will never realize its full potential (Earl, 2001; Sveiby, 2001; Zack, 1999b). This means that human factors, not IT, determine whether knowledge management programmes create value or not (Desouza & Awazu, 2006; Krogh, 1998; Rubenstein-Montano et al., 2001; Zhou & Fink, 2003). This can be called the ‘constructionist’ (Krogh, 1998), ‘behavioural’ (Earl, 2001), or ‘people-centric’ (Wiig, 1999a) perspective. This is emphasised in the KM literature by a multitude of authors16. This perspective recognizes that knowledge management is a major change initiative (Krogh et al., 2001) because it emphasises the social nature of knowledge and assumes that it is based mainly on fluid, inter-subjective and social processes. Hence, human aspects such as respect, trust, culture, the interaction of people and interpersonal relationships are of paramount importance. It regards knowledge as residing in our bodies and being closely related to our senses and previous experience - therefore not being universal - and recognizes employees as social beings who usually prefer conversations to IT or documents (Earl, 2001; Krogh, 1998; McKinlay, 2005; Nicolas, 2004; Sveiby, 2001; Wiig, 1999b). Davenport and Prusak (1998) put this argument in a nutshell by recommending organisations shift their focus “from access to attention, from velocity to viscosity, from documents to discussions” (p. 106)
Other authors such as Call (2005), Davenport and Prusak (1998), Nicolas (2004), Scholl et al. (2004), and Zhou and Fink (2003) conclude that, an interdisciplinary view of knowledge management that combines, and appropriately matches, information technology with human needs, processes, the organisational culture and other
16
Assudani, 2005; Davenport & Prusak, 1998; Kakabadse et al., 2003; Liebowitz, 1999; McCann & Buckner, 2004; Nicolas, 2004; Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995; Rubenstein-Montano et al., 2001; Scholl et al. 2004; Smoliar, 2003; Swan and Newell, 2000; Wickramasinghe, 2003; Zhou & Fink, 2003.
organisational factors, should be supported. Knowledge management is in a constant flux and there are still disagreements in many aspects due to various practical and scientific dilemmas. A major dilemma is that defining the scope and the aim of knowledge management is challenging. Although there is, of course, some comprehension of management as such, the understanding of knowledge, the object to be managed, is comparatively rather elementary. Therefore, Scholl et al. (2004) argue that it “does not come as a big surprise that it is difficult to manage something we haven’t understood yet” (p. 20). The problem with the existing literature - and according to Pfeffer and Sutton (1999) a major reason why many knowledge management projects have failed - is that terms like ‘intellectual capital’, ‘knowledge creation’ and ‘knowledge management’ and terminologies in regard to knowledge such as ‘drilling’, ‘mining’, ‘leveraging’, ‘stockpiles’, ‘reservoirs’, or ‘assets’ can be misleading. These terms entail the faulty assumption that knowledge can be accounted for by using traditional procedures for its measurement. Such approaches treat knowledge like a commodity, overemphasise the role of IT, ignore the importance of philosophy and assume that no distinction between tacit and explicit knowledge is necessary (Kakabadse et al., 2003; Pfeffer & Sutton, 1999; Scholl et al., 2004; Smoliar, 2003; Sveiby, 1997; Swan & Newell, 2000). In addition, Zhou and Fink (2003) challenge treating knowledge as an object by arguing that “knowledge is not a ‘thing’, or a system, but an ephemeral, active process of relating” (p. 87).
Even though some aspects of knowledge, such as organisational culture and structure, communication and information can be proactively managed, authors like Kakabadse et al. (2003) and Sveiby (2001) conclude that knowledge itself is unmanageable. Writings of influential scholars in this field such as Drucker, Nonaka and Takeuchi, Davenport and Prusak, and many others, concentrate on the management of people whose work depends considerably and fundamentally on what they know.