Knowledge Matters™

For a long time now I have thought knowledge management is all about individual, group and enterprise productivity. I feel so strongly about this that I use the term knowledge productivity™ in favour of knowledge management. Why? Well knowledge management at the moment can mean whatever one wants it to mean! Indeed this was the key finding of a bunch of so-called knowledge management practitioners at one of the major knowledge management conferences of 2007 – see my Black Art Definitions post for a rant on this finding! Apparently juggling is also an essential skill for knowledge management, but I digress. In conjunction with Pat Byrne I have been writing and presenting on knowledge productivity™ since 2003. It was heartening therefore to discover Christiaan Stam's PhD thesis - 'Knowledge productivity: designing and testing a method to diagnose knowledge productivity and plan for enhancement '.

Stam says knowledge productivity™ “is the process of converting knowledge into something of value” and later defines it as “management ability to generate knowledge-based results”. Patrick Byrne and I have defined knowledge productivity™ elsewhere, and a bit more expansively, as being:

“… a trans-disciplinary approach that integrates tools, techniques, and strategies to retain, organise, share, analyse, improve, and apply business expertise. It is a disciplined, deliberate, purposeful, and conscious method to manufacture knowledge from data, information and experience. Of necessity it involves the design, implementation and review of processes to improve knowledge creation and sharing behaviours. Ultimately knowledge productivity™ relies on individual and collective discipline to follow organisational process to achieve business objectives”.

I think the two definitions nicely complement each other, and I'll certainly be using Stam's ideas in my work.   I can’t do justice in this short post to Stam’s thesis, but suffice it to say he brings together the process and output perspectives found elsewhere in management literature to develop a knowledge productivity diagnostic method, which he calls the Knowledge Productivity Enhancer. At last we have the potential of something useful for organisations and managers!

Stam’s method has been tested in seven major Dutch organisations ranging from the Dutch Ministry of Justice to a multi-national pharmaceutical company. It can be characterized as an approach that helps to plan knowledge management initiatives by creating awareness about and assessing the quality of the process of knowledge creation. It is used to translate organisational strategy into knowledge management initiatives, or to connect existing knowledge management initiatives to strategic objectives. The method is well documented and illustrated in Chapter Six – I recommend you read it.

Now using the scale of “study, read, skim, bin” as an indicator of effort one should put into this document I think it warrants a read rating. Personally I intend to study the thesis. Our practitioners who think knowledge management can mean anything should definitely study Chapter Three. They will discover that clear thinking and analysis matters! They will also find that knowledge management is about enhancing productivity, a premise that is difficult to argue away.

Regards Graham