I will be happy to discuss it,

Yigal

Most people I work with put KM directly into an IT context. Others try to focus on people or knowledge but that IT thing still lingers in the background (like a bad habit). So, i have seen at least two distinct approaches, one that is mostly technologically driven, the other less so, to a degree, but still very much in an IT context.

Irrespective of what approach we might take, we often seem to make KM a part of a kind of an "Information Management Holy Trinity" for the information-age organization: there's Data (the father, or Source), then Information (the son, or that which is consubstantial to the Source and, simultaneously, a derivative of it), and finally there's Knowledge (the Spirit of Wisdom and its preservation and transmission, guiding all human-information endeavors) which somehow transcends data and information --and yet we insist it can be managed.

In my organization, if the topic of KM comes up, someone eventually draws a pyramid with data-managment on the bottom, information management in the middle, and Knowledge Management up on the top. Intuitively, I guess all this makes sense --certainly makes a neat picture for management. But I've rejected this vision and am left with both trying to explain why it's inadequate and create an alternative definition. So, I've been searching for a different way of looking at KM, one that is independent of any discussion of information technology and instead on how does this thing we like to call "knowledge" get created, used, moved around, preserved, discarded, and so on in an organization (or our society itself).

In order to do this, i've been experimenting with creating a new language to talk about it. So far, the best i've done is come up with a very rough-hewn idea i am calling "Meaning Management". My idea here is that what we really seem to be doing with all this data-information-knowledge is create meaning. This is what we really use to guide our decisions. If an information resource (here i mean data, information, knowledge, whatever; its format is anything from a note on a "post-it", or the WikiPedia, or a conversation with a co-worker) is to be useful in some way it has meaning, and that meaning is created by human relationships (perhaps influenced in some way by information technology). My thinking is that if information is ever made useful, then it is so because of the relationships made in context between people who created that information. Meaning is the key thing we should be thinking about managing --not just data, information, or knowledge. Such Meaning is not possible with relationships and such relationships are not possible without organizational structures of some sort (families, businesses, academic fields, etc).

My idea is really half-baked. But it makes a certain kind of sense to me: i want to get far enough on the outside of this data-information-knowledge business to create a way of describing what's really going on. I think by taking this look at it we might be able to see that things like culture, of one form or antoher, plays a far more significant role in our "knowledge management" and "learning organizations" than we give credit.