90000 hits for "The nonsense of knowledge management"

I found this article by TD Wilson last week while preparing myself for discussions around KM for my viva. Even though the article is from 2002 I think it helps understanding some problematic issues around KM such as hyped up software and consultant's promises.

Wilson basically argues that KM is just another fad and his criticism boils down to one sentence "It can be seen that knowledge is being used as a synonym for information." There is also the term of "Search and replace marketing": Everything that was sold as e.g. information retrieval software prior to say 1999 was afterwards simply rebranded as knowledge management and sold under this term.

"Once upon a time the excellent business research site, http://www.brint.com/, had a large section devoted to information management but, in 1999, if I remember aright, I wanted to locate something I had previously found there and used my hot-link, with no result. Eventually, I found that everything that had previously been located under 'information management' was now identified as 'knowledge management' and brint.com was claiming to be the Web's best site for information on the subject."

Wilson classifies some other concepts as fads, among them the Balanced Scorecard, Benchmarking and CRM, a classification I find difficult to agree on as there are clear benefits coming from these "fads".

So what has changed since 2002? I personally think KM has grown beyond software promises and I have seen real world examples where it has delivered benefits that would have hardly been achievable with a pure information systems approach. The term KM may not be ideal, as Sveiby is quoted by Wilson:

I don't believe knowledge can be managed. Knowledge Management is a poor term, but we are stuck with it, I suppose. "Knowledge Focus" or "Knowledge Creation" (Nonaka) are better terms, because they describe a mindset, which sees knowledge as activity not an object. A knowledge focused approach is a human vision, not a technological one. (sveiby.com)

I think 3 years on from this article it is safe to say KM is not a fad, however it might be limited in applicability across industries. Law firms are certainly among the heavy investors and adopters as are pharmaceutical companies. My impression is that consultancies mainly consult on it and dont have a lot of it themselves (The last time I asked a consultant from one of the large consultancies about the KM "solution" they sell he could not find details about it on his system. (And that was at a KM conference :-)) From an other consultancy I found a statement stating BCG invests quite heavily in KM, which I would certainly like to know more about.

Ron Friedman recently blogged about the future of KM himself using the fad comparison similar to Wilson:

A dozen years ago, TQM and business process re-engineering were the rage.
You rarely hear these terms now, but elements of those disciplines have been
widely adopted. A dozen years from now, perhaps we will no longer talk of KM; it
just may be embedded in other practices and departments, with a scope broader in
some respects and narrower in others than today.