Knowledge Management: The role of reports, tabulations, statement and measures

Nevertheless, independently of the argument above, knowledge is presented as something that belongs with the body/mind, something that is intangible:

“Knowledge is the awareness of what one knows through study, reasoning, experience or association, or through various other types of learning” (McInerney, p. 1009)

“Knowledge is not merely an object that can be placed, nor should it be confused with representation of knowledge in documents, databases, etc.” (McInerney, p.1010)

“Knowledge management is not so much the management of tangible assets such as data or information, but the active management and support of expertise” (Blair, p. 1022). This is in contrast to McInerney statement…

“Knowledge is not easily separable from the individuals that exercise it” (Blair, p. 1022)

The above statements lead one to believe that managing knowledge ought to be a difficult task, and indeed it is. What is knowledge management about then? Is it about the management of the intangible or management of the knowledge artifacts? From the readings it appears to be about both. If a manager is interested about using employees’ knowledge to resolve a hot issue at hand, he could call few experienced team members that could potentially resolve the issue in matter of few hours. This task of collaboration might not necessarily result in production of any knowledge artifacts (or information objects) and we would be saying that management of the ‘intangible’ knowledge has occurred. However, in majority of cases, due to efficiency and for practical purposes employees end up representing in one form or another part of their knowledge.

In reference to the above case, how did the manager know which employees’ expertise to solicit for the task at hand? One cannot manage something that is not known. Or, as Blair put it in relation to organizational assets: “This means that an essential prerequisite for knowledge management is to have some kind of ‘knowledge inventory’ or ‘knowledge map’ that provides an explicit tabulation of the organization’s knowledge assets” (Blair, p.1027). The challenge for an organization to know what it ‘knows’ is a real one and I believe that elaboration of this challenge will lead us to understand knowledge management as multi-faceted problem. One related to the real management of knowledge (the intangible, the tacit), yet another related to the management of explicit knowledge, a paradox in itself I believe since ‘explicit knowledge’, defined as “knowledge that has been explained, recorded or documented” (McInerney, p. 1012), amounts to management of information object or knowledge artifacts. An important facet however, is the production and dissemination of reports, statements and other tabulations and measures which serve the purpose of ‘documenting’ what is known in a particular organization, attempting to make known that which was not known before. These reports, statements, and tabulation are unique knowledge artifacts, a kind of meta-knowledge-artifacts as they present pointers to knowledge artifacts and information objects as well pointers to the intangible/tacit knowledge in form of expert profiles. It is questionable whether there is a way to even point in any way to a tacit knowledge. Given that “tacit knowledge, sometimes known as implicit knowledge, is unspoken and hidden” (McInerney, p. 1011), the only way to referrer to is through its representation, i.e. expert’s profile. An expert profile is nothing more than a statement, a report, a representation of situational and contextual slice of individual’s or organizational knowledge. This suggests that perhaps it is not possible to manage knowledge in the true sense of the meaning of the phrase. Rather, KM attempts to approximate the management of knowledge through reports, statements and tabulations related to the intellectual capital (IC) residing in individual employees suspended in the organizational social network: “it is not only individual experiences that create knowledge; it is the networks of people who meet and work with each other that often cause knowledge to migrate and be created” (McInerney, p. 1014).

Blair points out that such statements are helpful for finding what one might be looking for, but also as browsing tools helping employees find what they might not have known exists around them: “The flexibility in arranging and presenting data and information enabled the users of these systems to discover correlation in the data they had not seen before” (Blair, p. 1023).

Lehr and Rice (2002) more clearly than Blair and McInerney stress the importance of such statements for knowledge management through the use of measures as manifestation of organizational knowledge: “One common objective of knowledge management practices is to implement one or more kinds of knowledge repository, to gather, organize, disseminate, and make available knowledge, an pointers to individuals with expertise and shared interests, throughout the organization” (p. 1061). Lehr et al. “define organizational measure as explicit definitions of the characteristics, or comparison to criteria (performance, in general), of organizational inputs, processes, and outputs, or stakeholders behaviors and perceptions” (p.1061).

Mouritsen, Larsen, and Bukh (2001) provide one such description in their article on intellectual capital (IC) and knowledge management. The core argument they try to convey across is that IC statements are knowledge management tools empowering managers and stakeholders to manage their tacit and implicit knowledge. Having described IC of an organization as the value far and beyond its book value, including knowledge, information, intellectual property, experience, skills, education, etc., produced and held together by the set of elements that it refers to and is able to incorporate in its story or explanation (p. 741), Mouritsen et al. argue that IC statements are able to bring forth organizational knowledge for further use, whether it is in tacit form embedded in people’s minds as skills, experiences, knowledge and wisdom, or captured and represented in knowledge repositories for use by humans and machines as well. For a new entity, a construct such as IC statement, in the network of human and non-human simple and composite entities linked to each other by their position in the organizational structure as well as the physical transport for exchange of information, to be able to act and perform and become an actor, it must be understood as such.

The importance of IC statements emerges as a valuable and common element and challenge across the articles. Due to its central stage in the knowledge management process of knowledge creation (tacit and explicit), transfer and organization, it is imperative that IC statement and other forms of representing that what is known deserve further and more detailed study. In what format and form should such statement as agents for change be represented, and through what media should they be disseminated? This needs to be analyzed through the prism of the dual nature and function of IC statements. Such discourse partially explains the ‘how’ in KM, both for managing what is labeled as tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge.

Like other management tools and other IT application and services, especially content management and collaboration software, all IC statements are not created equal. The diversity of tacit and explicit knowledge suggests that the form, format, genre, and the medium of dissemination are determining factors in the production and utilization of IC statements. Situationally and contextually, numbers, charts, visualization techniques, images, video, audio, e-mail, discussion lists, etc. all play decisive role in the ability of the IC statement to provide that which they were meant to provide in a form and format easily understandable and applicable by the end users. Blair notes that “data, text, images, schematics, video, audio, Web pages, compound, and multimedia documents can all be important ancillaries to Knowledge management” (p. 1026).

The underlying and the basic function of such IC statements and measures is to “externalize knowledge through making learned procedures and valued outcomes explicit”, mainly representing the part of the tacit knowledge which is representable: “[A measure] can be used to internalize knowledge, that is creating new tacit knowledge from the explicit knowledge of the measures, by focusing attention to contextual, complex, or infrequent issues otherwise not attended to” (Lehr, p. 1071). In addition to the ability to ‘transform’ the tacit knowledge into explicit, or in Brookes’s words moving knowledge from World I and representing it in World III, IC statements and measures enable the users of these statements to see what could not have been easily seen, thus aiding the user in the ‘creation’ of new knowledge by learning what they didn’t know beyond what is represented in the statements. This suggests a full loop dual functionality of such statements and measures: they help to represent the tacit knowledge and also by the same process they create ‘new’ knowledge. This characteristic of IC statements and measures could not be further from McInerney’s dynamic characteristic of knowledge management moderated by the situation and the context (p.1009): “knowledge is appropriately dynamic because it is constantly changing through experiences and learning” (p. 1010)

What are the challenges in the production and dissemination of IC statements and measures? In identifying these challenges we need to perhaps look at few things: a) what type of intellectual capital and knowledge are these statements and measures representing and meta-representing, b) what is the intended use, c) the role of dissemination channels and media type, d) the role of the context. The desired result would be to design meaningful and understandable intellectual capital statements and measures in a way that they would represents and transfer the most out of the ‘intangible world’ and into the ‘tangible world’, moderated by the context and the situation as well as the available channels and modes of dissemination. The representation aspect of such statements is clearly emphasized by McInerney: “Although most information managers are not trained as journalists, a reporter’s skills of capturing, recording, and reporting new knowledge could be beneficial in the active process of finding out what an organization’s members know” (p. 1016). One could argue that the representation stage is unnecessary in the case when spoken language is use to transfer ‘knowledge’. Even the spoken language though is form of representation of the intangible (short lived unless it is audio recorded or transcribed) and we clearly attempt to use the most appropriate words for representing concepts when sharing our thoughts with others.

Clearly, the KM discourse has mostly concentrated in corporate environments. Knowledge management has been described as tools and processes whose bottom line is to give corporations competitive advantage over their competitors: “It is the experience of those in organization that creates the knowledge that, if used and shared, gives one organization advantages over another” (McInerney, p. 1013). In such environment, the users of IC statements are employees, managers, shareholders, and consumers. The implications of KM concepts and practices seem to be studied to a lesser degree in non-corporate settings. This perhaps is understandable given that funders as stakeholders like to see returns of their investments in monetary/tangible terms. In the case of government agencies and non-profit organizations KM concepts and practices would be applied to manage social capital that does not necessarily pertain to a particular corporate entity. The effects of knowledge management practices in non-corporate environment could touch the society at large (the citizenry), hopefully in a positive way if not used for control and power, resulting in better social policies, improved education programs, improved social and healthcare benefits, and other social goods improving the well-being of citizens.

Given that the driving force is quite different in corporate and non-corporate settings, it suggests that this introduces yet another dimension to the understanding of IC statements production, dissemination, and use. While corporate IC statements may want to emphasize on the profit making aspect of the intangible, non-corporate entities usually emphasize on the social capital that can be brought forth.

Conclusion

In this papers I have tried to show the role of intellectual capital (IC) statements (Mauritsen et al, 2001) and measures (Lehr et al., 2002) as an important, if not the most important factor in the process of translating ‘intangible knowledge’ into ‘tangible knowledge’ (knowledge artifacts and information objects). Whether this process is part of what is called KM is not very important. It is imperative to understand however, that representation of knowledge and the intangible is a key to effective utilization of what people have in their heads: “Shera saw the coding of representation of knowledge as the catalyst that would make the retrieval of information and knowledge possible” (McInerney, p. 1014). IC statements are at the same time knowledge artifacts (as ‘created’ and represented knowledge by means of organizing symbols, narratives, numbers and visualizations) as well as meta-knowledge-artifacts (pointing to knowledge artifacts), aiding users in ‘knowledge’ transfer (intangible to tangible) as well as creation (tangible to intangible).

The challenge posed forth is to understand the process of IC statements and measures creation and dissemination and their effect on knowledge creation, transfer, sharing, storage, and organization. IC statements and measures are positioned as tools to manage the knowledge artifacts: “In knowledge management program it is the knowledge artifact, or the thing, that is managed, not the knowledge itself, and the knowledge representation must reflect the action of knowledge acquisition” (McInerney, p.1010)

As I have explained above, the design of such tools (statements, reports, measure, tabulations) to fit the task at hand (create, transfer, store and organize knowledge artifacts) depends on many contextual and situational factors. The articles suggest that knowledge representation (including here statements, reports, measures and tabulations) as knowledge artifacts and as meta-knowledge-artifacts depends on few factors: what type of knowledge is being represented (declarative, procedural, causal, functional, etc), what is the intended use (presentational, factual, task oriented, information retrieval), the channel available for dissemination (e-mail, web, audio, etc.), and its context (corporate, government, non-profit, local, global, etc.). All these factors will effect the representation, its form, format, genre, etc. For example, it is almost intuitive that the form, format, and the genre of a knowledge object intended for information retrieval would be different than a presentation of meeting’s agenda. Or, in the case of government agencies and non-profit organizations the IC statements will perhaps differ in form and format given that the stakeholders are the publics at large, intended to improve the social well being of all citizens.

Additional questions that surface are: which representation of knowledge is better for knowledge transfer vs. information retrieval if any; what would be an effective way to represent measures; are numbers, narratives and visualizations enough or should we design other constructs to help us better represent the intangible; how well does the knowledge artifact represent the knowledge; what can be done to improve knowledge representation to improve knowledge management.

These reading have made me think about such tools as statements, reports, tabulations and measures and their role in the process of knowledge creation, transfer, representation, and organization. I believe to have understood and explained the enormous importance of these tools. However, many questions remain to be resolved to explicate the interplay between these tools and knowledge management concepts and practice. This seems like a topic I would like to pursue for my semester project in this class. [194:610]

References:

Blair, D.C. (2002). Knowledge Management: Hype, Hope, or Help? Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 53, (12) 1019-1028

Brookes, B.C. (1980). The foundation of information science. Part I. Philosophical aspects. Journal of Information Science 2, 125-133

Lehr, K.J. & Rice, R.E. (2002). Organizational Measures as a Form of Knowledge Management: A Multitheoretic, Communication-Based Exploration. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 53, (12) 1060-1073

McInerney, C. (2002). Knowledge Management and the Dynamic Nature of Knowledge. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 53, (12) 1009-1018

Mouritsen, J., Larsen, H.T., & Bukh, P.N.D. (2001). Intellectual capital and the ‘capable firm’: narrating, visualizing, and numbering for managing knowledge. Accounting, Organizations and Society, 26, 735-762