“Just Google it”. An often heard statement, certainly with the younger and more tech savvy parts of the work force. The most popular of public and free accessible search engines is most certainly a portal to huge amounts of information and of knowledge shared by any wiling person on the internet. With all this information available should we then still organise for collecting, curating and creating knowledge in the confinement of individual organisations?

From a pragmatic and economical point of view one should say no. Why should an organisation bother to document and organise knowledge and information that is already available? This argument may hold for more generally applicable or domain independent knowledge. You may find a lot of IT related ‘how-to’ materials ranging from general information on programming to video presenting technological solutions and how to use them. And more, this information is evolving at a high pace. However it is also the information publishers distribute as paper print books or online materials that lead to the creation of libraries for those who do not want every member of the organisation buying a copy of the book they may need. Digital availability however has virtualised the library and what once was the beginning of knowledge management has been made redundant, certainly when you look at the corporate space.

Another argument not to invest in knowledge management is the quick paced change and innovation in current society. Why would you invest in knowledge that is short lived? Shouldn’t we better invest in capacity and competence to learn and adapt? Most certainly, staff that is capable of learning new skills and techniques will be worth  more and ensure organisational agility and sustainability. Opposite to this argument is of course that innovation can only be generated with sufficient knowledgeable and talented people building further on an already available corpus of knowledge.

From a protectionist or legal asset point of view, corporate knowledge is all that  should be protected, that is part of intellectual property (IP) and that sets an organisation a side in the innovation landscape. It builds on a notion of ‘knowledge as property’ that is an asset or tool for building innovation, new products and services. Organisations with a strong research and development wing, would certainly fall in this category of corporate knowledge use. But also here, open innovation initiatives break down barriers and put the property reflex into perspective. Would this then mean that there is a knowledge of practice (as Cook and Brown state in their 1999 article on the epistemologies of knowledge). As they indicate the common knowledge pool is situated on the level of activity domain – such as medicine or mechanical engineering – or more specifically on the level of a company or a group adhering to specific working methods.

The technological asset view strives to the creation of an analytical inventory of knowledge elements. They will be expressed as business rules by business analysts and IT people or derived by learning algorithms to be integrated in business applications automating a maximum of processes and tasks. Knowledge is here seen as a productivity asset increasingly standardising and commoditising knowledge work with a repetitive nature.

Taking a human resource based vantage would see knowledge as the possession or attribute of somebody and reduce knowledge management to recruiting for a context and task at hand, and so a proponent of the resource approach will look for somebody with the required training and/or experience to get a specific job done. Extending the resource view to a social level this would imply that knowledge is shared either through education and training or via professional networks of likewise trained professionals that build a certain experience. As a consequence  organisations are not stable, oriented to short term goals and populated with itinerants renting out their skills.

The culture stance on the issue certainly stresses the existence of organisational knowledge expressed in working methods, specific vocabulary and shared experiences and understanding or historical cases that transmit knowledge. Reasoning in a culture building logic will require strong group building and socialisation for all new comers, embedding them in the group logic.

In a social group logic, discussion is central to transferring knowledge and attaching meaning and applicability to the context of use. Knowledge is contextually requested, explained and adapted to the needs of solving the problem at hand. In this way no stable corpus will be established and thus relates strongly to the human resources approach.

In view of the conclusions that Tsoukas and Vladimirov draw on the fact that “individuals understand generalisations only through connecting the latter to particular circumstances” and as such knowledge is developed by employees while doing their job stable knowledge does not exist. It is a continuous succession of learning experiences. Tuning the wheels of learning efficiency “knowledge management then is primarily the dynamic process of of turning a unreflective practice into a reflective one but elucidating the rules guiding the activities of practice.” In this way one should consider the need for guiding information and knowledge presented on a structured meta level balanced with social sharing of knowledge through discussion initiated by a problem to be solved related to the task at hand at a specific point in time.

In this context knowledge management will focus on

This will give opportunities to address problem solving tactics that differ across generations. The older generations will mainly draw from memory, what they have learned in the past and turn to documentation when the answer is not known. The younger people tend to start googling and in a next resort launching requests in their social network.