"Would you tell me please, which way I ought to go from here?"
"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the cat.
"I don't much care where," said Alice.
"Then it doesn't matter which way you go," said the cat.

This quote from Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland sums up knowledge management for me - it's a frustrating discipline!  It's frustrating because as a discipline it seems to be directionless.  It's frustrating because some practitioners claim almost anything to be managing knowledge.  I often liken these practitioners to Lewis Carroll's Humpty Dumpty who said in a rather scornful tone, "When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less."  It is precisely a lack of shared understanding and common meaning that causes so many problems. 

So what's the solution?  One way of solving this problem might be to position oneself in a ‘school of knowledge management'.  But what are the schools?  Yesterday I came across an article by Professor Michael Earl which answers this question.  It's titled ‘Knowledge management strategies: towards a taxonomy', and was published in the Journal of Management Information.  Despite being published in 2001 it's well worth a read.

Earl says knowledge management approaches can be positioned into three primary schools - the technocratic, economic, and behavioural.  Each of these schools has distinct attributes, philosophies, focuses and units of analysis.  I don't agree his attribute and philosophy rows, which I think should be reversed.  My take, which is otherwise true to his article, reverses the attribute and philosophy rows and substitutes the term attribute for approach.  It is shown in the table below. 

Earl does not privilege one school or attribute over another, nor does he say they are mutually exclusive, but he does say one is dominate.  I won't paraphrase what he says because I do think you should read the article for yourself (I haven't linked to it because of copyright).  That said I think the table is reasonably self explanatory. 

I can position myself without too much qualification.  My primary school is the behavioural school, but I have elements of technocratic thinking.  I subscribe to the organisational and spatial philosophies, but like the cartographic philosophy with its connectivity approach and mapping focus.

For me this taxonomy goes some way to solving the direction and meaning problems.  Understanding which school, philosophy and approach you belong to matters - it determines your world view.  Which school do you belong to?  How might this taxonomy be improved?

Regards, Graham