Yesterday I was interviewed by Eric Burns from the Babson College Working Knowledge Research Center in Boston. (Tom Davenport and Larry Prusak are the Center Directors). Eric is exploring the links between knowledge management and innovation, and wanted to get a sense of the current status of knowledge management practices in industry. I spoke about my 4-year involvement with TARDIS , which is a knowledge management initiative within the Australian Defence Force. I am one of the developers of TARDIS and have been involved with it since its conception. As such I am very aware that anything I say and write is coloured by my deep and personal involvement. Indeed David Snowden blogged three days ago about this problem. He said – “I have sat in many a conference listening to a presentation from a KM person is a company where the statements about what has happened bear little relation to the reality on the ground.” I pointed this world view problem out to Eric and suggested he may want to speak to some of the users.

Coincidentally, two weeks ago Patrick Lambe invited me to be one of the judges for the Singapore iKMS KM Excellence Awards. He sent some documentation to each of the potential judges for comment. I commented by saying - “We need to understand the organisational motivations and know something about the organisation. … I also think we need to clearly understand the scope and intent of the initiative. A webpage is not knowledge management, nor is a database, and nor is a blog, or a collection of stories. These are enablers and a step along the path. Any initiative should demonstrate a holistic attempt to bring together the people, process and technology elements, for organisational and knowledge worker benefit.”

These separate events bring me to my point. We each have a world view, or Weltensicht, and these world views are not necessarily shared. If knowledge management as a discipline is to mature we need to work towards a common world view as far as possible. I suggest this begins with a shared lexicon. Why is it that almost every journal article I read opens with a definition of knowledge and knowledge management? Knowledge management has been around for almost 20 years (longer by some accounts) and we still can’t agree what it is! I think the time has come to draw a line in the sand. In a convoluted way this brings me to my opening paragraph. I think Davenport and Prusak’s definition of knowledge as a “fluid mix of data, experience, practice, values, beliefs, standards, context, and expert insight that provides a conceptual arrangement for evaluating and incorporating new data, information and experiences” is a definition that satisfies most parties. Of course the challenge is to actually manage all of these things!

Regards, Graham.