July 2005

Course summary

Introduction

In the last five weeks, we have covered a lot of ground, so as the course draws to a close, it seems useful to review and reflect on the concepts we have introduced. I have to admit, that to begin with, a course about “Knowledge Management” seemed rather odd to me: I had heard the term once or twice, but knew little else about it, and it sounded like the sort of thing (managing knowledge) which library and information professionals have been doing since the time papyrus was invented, so at times this has been quite a steep learning curve. You may recall that we began (as a light hearted way of getting to know other buddies) of asking you to think up knowledge pathologies, and since we did so, I have come across another rather technical sounding one: knowledge dystonia! Although this may sound like one of those odd little Eastern European states, in purely medical terms, dystonia means abnormal movements because of faulty muscle contraction. In organisational terms, it occurs when messages from management (equivalent to nerve impulses) either fail to reach the right destination, or fire off mutually antagonistic activities.

Defining Knowledge Management

We asked you to start by filling in Maryam Sarrafzadeh’s questionnaire about Knowledge Management, before you even commenced the course. Out of interest, you might like to re-visit it, (http://www.rmit.edu.au/bus/bit/km), to see if the course has changed the ideas you had a few weeks ago. We then had a keynote from Caroline De Brún looking at some working definitions, and introducing the idea of explicit (documentary) knowledge and tacit (more personal) knowledge as both important.

Working together….

Since we will not (at least during this course) be meeting face-to-face, we have devised various exercise for interaction with other members of your buddy groups: sharing reflections on a case study of a PCT developing a Knowledge Management strategy about parallel events in your own organisation; exploring knowledge mapping; and group discussions on intranets and evaluating Knowledge Management strategies.

…..and going it alone

We have also used a variety of techniques for individual exercises: a guided reading (using focussed questions to help you extract specific nuggets of information from a conference paper); a quiz (to enable you to assess your knowledge of key terms); identifying who your own knowledge champions might be; a competition (okay, more for fun, but we all need break!); assessing your own organisation’s progress towards Knowledge Management using David Skyrme’s questionnaire; selling and promoting the concept of Knowledge Management; and developing an action plan.

Mapping and scanning

As some of the concepts in Knowledge Management are rather theoretical, I felt on firmer ground with tools like knowledge mapping and environment scanning. Thinking about information flows within my own organisation (a University), I realised that it is more complex and bi-directional than I first suspected. In a previous course, we looked at some other “knowledge pathologies” like hoarding (information sinks) leading to duplication of holdings. Keeping the bio-medical metaphor, it now seems that since our own memories are based on connections between neurons, the more connections there are, the lower the risk of losing that specific memory. So, although we should avoid redundant information stores, multiple connections between them may be more assets than liabilities. I first encountered environment scanning as Horizon Scanning, specifically NICE’s policy of looking for new and emerging medical technologies. In a University environment I suppose the most obvious examples are anticipating how to deal with changes in teaching (such as top up fees and the “widening access” programmes) and capitalising on novel sources of research funding.

Communities of Practice

We devoted three days to this important concept, with a briefing from Adrienne Speake; a PowerPoint presentation of the NeLH's network of specialist libraries, as a specific example of how such a community supports healthcare in practice; and a reflective exercise about how to set up a self-perpetuating community. My own feeling is that in the academic world, many such communities exist, and at any one time I am probably a member of several, but that many are fluid and often ephemeral, assembling for a specific project, such as reporting to the School on some proposed innovation, or bidding for (and subsequently we all hope, delivering) a funded research project.

Course work

We are aware of how hard you have been working on the various portfolio tasks, both individually and in your groups and we look forward to the final versions. You will of course note that there is a space in the portfolio for today, for some final reflection on the course and the lessons you have learned. Among the issues you might like to consider here are:

How might I promote Knowledge Management in my own organisation?

How can I use the materials from the course?

What else do I need to know about Knowledge Management?

How has the course changed my attitudes to Knowledge Management? (here you might like to revisit Maryam Sarrafzadeh’s questionnaire)

…but you are free to bring in any other learning or reflection to complete this final portfolio entry.

What next?

We hope that you will have several take home skills at the end of the course, such as knowledge mapping and environment scanning, which will help you to evaluate Knowledge Management strategies, and engage in Knowledge Management programmes in your own organisations.

Conclusions

As the course draws to a close, I am left feeling that Knowledge Management is “something old, something new” – a mix of continuity and change in library and information science terms. On the one hand the concept, if not the name, has been around for years, possibly trading under concepts like “disseminating good practice.” It also encompasses very traditional library skills, as we discussed in the “Classifying and Codifying Knowledge” briefing. However, techniques like communities of practice, the establishing of knowledge champions and environment scanning are genuine innovations, suggesting a move onwards from storing and retrieving factual information, to more active use and application of the content.

Although some people may approach a library as a repository of documents (a large scale archive), where all they want the librarian to do is point them to the right shelf, many enter the library with a less focussed aim “I want to find out about x”, and quite possibly they initially know very little about x! One thinks of school children (or even some long suffering parents!), wandering into the nearest public library asking “I have to do a project on cocoa growing in Africa; do you know where I start?” Such people approach the library more as a repository of corporate human intelligence, hoping to be gently steered to the bits most appropriate to their need and expertise.

Maybe once librarians were the guardians of this sort of “animus mundi,” carefully hording their valuable treasures, prudently providing access to enquirers. With the arrival of modern communication technologies, however, we went to the other extreme of information push, with many of us swamped by e-mail group postings, newsletter, updates, and old fashioned hard copy, often very little of it either useful or relevant. However, we may now be ready to move on, maybe from “Information Technology” (the often indiscriminate broadcasting of facts) to “Knowledge Technology” (the more focussed use of expertise). Knowledge Management may offer a way ahead, maybe even dare we say a “Third Way,” where organisations make more active use of their information treasures, while delivering them in a more targeted and appropriate way.