Effective Knowledge Management: A Best Practice Blueprint

Citation

Roper, M. (2003), "Effective Knowledge Management: A Best Practice Blueprint", Journal of Documentation, Vol. 59 No. 1, pp. 118-119. https://doi.org/10.1108/00220410310458082

This is one of a series of self‐study manuals sponsored by the CBI with the aim of stimulating UK companies, large and small, to follow best practice in the field of management. This particular volume aims to provide leaders of organisations with a blueprint for managing “knowledge without tears”. Hence, it is a work of synthesis rather than analysis, presented in the form of an authoritative and user‐friendly guide to best practice in knowledge management.

Knowledge management is seen as being about managing people, not technology. Hence, much of the book is an adaptation of general management principles and techniques to the establishment of an organisational environment within which knowledge is recognised as a key intangible business asset to be created and used effectively. Benchmarking – identifying best practice and adopting and adapting it to the individual situation with a view to achieving superior performance – is presented as the key to good management and, accordingly, considerable use is made of case studies to enhance the didactic message. The understanding and management of change in the face of globalisation and other external challenges are addressed. The correlation between managing knowledge and effective leadership is stressed and guidance is given on the role of the leader in introducing a collaborative culture into an organisation as means of empowering its staff to “facilitate decision making close to the customer”. A number of techniques for measuring intangible assets – the business excellence model, the balanced scorecard, the Skandia navigator and the intangible assets monitor – are introduced as useful tools for monitoring performance in the management of knowledge.

Knowledge itself is defined as the interpretation and use of information and is clearly differentiated both from information and from the raw data from which information in its turn derives. It is differentiated also from information technology, which is seen as an enabler, not a driver, of knowledge management. Knowledge may be tacit (located in employees’ heads) or explicit (presented in documentary form or embedded in products) and stress is placed on the importance of transferring tacit or personal knowledge into explicit knowledge which may then be shared for the benefit of the whole organisation.

In some respects the conventional distinction between knowledge, information and data followed here may be too simplistic and static. It fails to recognise their iterative nature, whereby today’s knowledge becomes tomorrow’s information and the day after tomorrow’s data. Indeed, many of the potential sources of information listed in the book (to which this reviewer would have added the organisation’s own records and archives) would have represented knowledge at the time of their creation, while the Internet, which is presented as a significant tool for sharing and transferring knowledge, is notoriously dynamic. The Internet is notorious also for the variable quality and authenticity of the information which it carries and a GIGO warning would not have been out of place, not only in that context, but also more generally in respect of the transfer of data and information into knowledge and the subsequent use of that knowledge. If data are incomplete or misread, the information is invalid; if information is misinterpreted, the knowledge is flawed; even authentic knowledge can be misdirected or misconstrued.