There's a strong overlap between content management and KM, and you can get into a sort of turf war over this overlap. See for example this post by Mary Abrahams on "Librarians vs Knowledge managers"
Sometimes the content managers stake a claim for KM, and in these cases, KM becomes a matter of documentation, of taxonomies, of search engines, and loses sight of the tacit knowledge, of communities of practice, of peer assist and AAR.
Sometimes, it seems, KM people stake a claim for content managment. Mary quotes Morgan Wilson, a law librarian, as describing the outcome
"KM ends up cannibalizing the library, creating a two tiered system in which the
library is definitely subordinate. The library remains responsible for
reference, document delivery and training; time intensive activities which KM
doesn’t want to be burdened with. Cataloging remains with the library by
default, but it is not appreciated or understood by the KM masters and is
marginalized. KM takes on several higher status activities which the librarians
used to be responsible for: liaising and outreach with the users in the practice
groups, developing the research section of the intranet, working on new ICT
projects and managing the library staff. Because KM is taking on additional
work, it needs more people. The trouble is that KM professionals are lawyers and
are not cheap. To balance the books, the library is shrunk."
The turf-war zone is shown in the venn diagram above, and is defined by two observations
1. Not all knowledge is recorded. I have described recorded knowledge as "explicit knowledge" above, to follow common practice, although this is not the sense in which the term was orginally used.
2. Not all documents and content are explicit knowledge. In fact, very little content is explicit knowledge. Much of it is information, which informs you of things, but doesnt give you know-how, or the ability to make correct decisions, or take correct action (see my post on data/information/knowledge) The explicit knowledge is the advice, the tips and hints, the how-tos, the guidelines and checklists, the procedures and manuals, the training and e-learning material.
So both the content managers/librarians and the KM people can legitimately stake a claim on the overlap area - those few documents or pieces of content which are both knowledge and content. And when they use this claim to expland their empires, then we get into trouble.
So how do we solve the issue? Simple - we work together. Either we sit in one team, which is what my South African colleague Ian Corbett did in De Beers (where the cyber-librarian was a key part of the KM team), or we have two teams but with a common framework and aligned strategies. We don't fight each other, as this puts both content management and KM equally at risk.
Posts
