Why some knowledge is also information, also vice versa, and what to do about it.

This blog post is about the knowledge continuum, the relationship between knowledge and information, and how information management and knowledge management both handle the overlap between the two. This is still a thorny topic, and there are still organisations that think information management and knowledge management are essentially the same thing. But they aren’t, and here’s why.

The Knowledge continuum

Let us assume that we are talking about knowledge in the sense that it refers to human ability, “know-how“, the ability to make decisions and take actions. Immediately we run into the deficiencies of the English language, because in English we also tend to use the word Knowledge for the accumulation of facts and information –  “know-what” in other words. Where in other languages these two concepts – know-how and know-what – have two different names (Savoir and Connaitre, Kennen and Vissen etc). But if we assume that we are talking about know-how, then this comes in a continuum, as  shown in the figure above, and as described below.

The continuum

1. There is the knowledge you don’t know you have – the deep tacit knowledge, which is intimately linked with the person themselves, and which can only be deployed by deploying the person;
2. There is the knowledge you know you have but haven’t yet expressed – explicit knowledge by the original definition (knowledge that can be readily articulated, codified, accessed and verbalised), or sometimes referred to as implicit knowledge. This knowledge can be transferred form one person to another by bringing them together in conversation; 
3. This knowledge then, in conversation, moves to the next stage of the continuum and becomes knowledge you have expressed but not recorded. This is explicit uncodified knowledge – spread through conversation, and open to being recorded.
4. Finally there is knowledge you have recorded – explicit codified knowledge in the form of documents or recordings which contain know-how, and which can guide or advise others towards action.  Here are your recipes, your tips and hints, your guidance notes, training material, best practices, standard operating procedures and checklists. 

As knowledge moves from the left of the continuum to the right, it loses richness and context, but gains in both manageability and robustness. By robustness I mean that much of the deep tacit knowledge may be a combination of real knowledge, options, biases and falsehoods (see here for a discussion of tacit knowledge and cognitive bias) and it is only through conversation and synthesis that these opinions are tested and become validated as knowledge. 

Various people draw the boundary between knowledge and information at different places on this continuum. Some draw it between stages 2 and 3, and claim that as soon as something is spoken it has become information. Others draw it between 3 and 4, claiming it has become information once it is codified. I would prefer to say that at stage 4, it is both information and knowledge. It is information which conveys knowledge in a written form, just as in stage 3 it is conversation which conveys knowledge, or knowledge in a spoken form.

Information and Knowledge are not exclusive alternatives in some sort of Western Dualism, and something in our stage 4 above can be both information and knowledge.

However there is one more item on our continuum.

5. The codified explicit knowledge, which is held in the form of documents, finds itself rubbing shoulders with other documents – the documents which are not codified knowledge at all.