This blog post is a reprise from the archives, and concerns the question of where Knowledge comes from. In most of the Knowledge Management training courses I run, I ask the question “where does knowledge come from?” Always, every time, the first answer I get is “Experience – Knowledge comes
There is a real problem with the concept of tacit and explicit knowledge, namely the level of disagreement about what these terms really mean. Until this is fixed, these terms may be unusable. I blogged about this issue of the definitional minefield a year ago, and had an experience last
Here’s another post from the archives (corrected for some inaccuracy) which makes the case that much of the confusion around Knowledge Management may be due to an uncharacteristic deficiency in the English Language. Knowledge Management has always been in a state of confusion. There is no established understanding of the
Still the confusion remains between Information Management/Enterprise Content Management and Knowledge Management. Here are 5 points of difference and 1 point of overlap. In fact these pictures only have one point of similarlity. Much like KM and IM/ECM I have covered the difference between KM and IM many times on
Humans have a habit of combining concepts into “chunks”. It helps us remember things more easily, but the jargon associated with “chunks” can confuse others when we try to communicate, if they don’t have the same set of combined concepts. I am going to attempt to de-chunk and dejargonise KM
There are two end-member camps in the KM world – those who think KM is something revolutionary which is going to change the world, and those who think its nothing new, and nothing really different. I have a foot in each camp Let me explain why. Knowledge management is nothing
The link between Data, Information and Knowledge is not as simple as the three being a linear progression. Knowledge is something you ADD to Data and Information, rather than something that arises FROM Information. As an illustration, consider the link between data, information and knowledge as they are involved in
“Knowledge Management” is not an oxymoron, the term is merely being read the wrong way round. One primary argument against the term “Knowledge Management” is that knowledge cannot be managed. Knowledge is an intangible, is personal and context specific, and is not an object in it’s own right, so how
In an interesting New Scientist article, Harry Collins (author of “Tacit and Explicit knowledge“) describes three types of Tacit Knowledge. Image from wikimedia commons We know about the concept of tacit knowledge, which originally was described as knowledge which cannot be expresses (although often nowadays people use the term for knowledge which
This is a short analysis of the story of WalMart’s preparation for hurricanes, in order to explore the link between Big Data and Knowledge. Hurricane Irma food distribution, by City of St Pete on Flickr One of the earliest and most famous “big data” stories is around Walmart and it’s