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KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
Most information professionals, when asked what they do, respond with a variation on an information retrieval theme. Boiled down to its essence, it says that information professionals' mission in life is to provide the information you need, when you need it; in the format you need it. The best of information professionals personalize this message, tailoring it to the audience. Engineers are told the information will keep bridges from falling down. Bankers are told the information will keep loans from going south. Lawyers are told the information will help them win cases. Sales personnel are told the information will help them identify prospective customers. Chemists are told the information will identify new compounds and new uses for old compounds.
This is all well and good. In fact, phrasing our work descriptions in our clients' terms is an excellent marketing technique. But it doesn't go far enough. What information professionals overlook is the creative nature of information work—the act of information creation. We not only retrieve information, we transform that information into something new and different.
We can be creative by summarizing what we've found. This consists of a factual rendition of information uncovered in the process of online sector research. Even more creative is analyzing what we've found. This goes beyond a simply summary to draw conclusions from the facts gleaned from online research. Analysis and Trend Forecasting implies that information professionals have sufficient knowledge and awareness of the research topic to have and express valid opinions that will help the end user of the information make informed decisions.
Although it may not sound as creative as summarizing and analyzing, even the arrangement of information can be transformational. If a particular information analysis, chart, or graph is featured prominently in delivered results, it has more impact on the recipient than if the information is buried towards the back of a report. What an information professional chooses to highlight can easily change the perception of research results.
Knowledge and Information
In management consultancy it is, perhaps, not too serious to fail to distinguish between related concepts (although I suspect that management researchers would not be happy with this proposition), but for the fields of information science and information systems, it is clearly necessary
For us to distinguish between 'information' and 'knowledge'. Failure to do so results in one or other of these terms standing as a synonym for the other, thereby confusing anyone who wishes to understand what each term signifies.
Happily, it is quite easy to distinguish between 'knowledge' and 'information' in such a way as to remove ambiguity and, at the same time, demonstrate the fundamental nonsense of 'knowledge management'.
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'Knowledge' is defined as what we know: knowledge involves the mental processes of comprehension, understanding and learning that go on in the mind and only in the mind, however much they involve interaction with the world outside the mind, and interaction with others. Whenever we wish to express what we know, we can only do so by uttering messages of one kind or another - oral, written, graphic, gestural or even through 'body language'. Such messages do not carry 'knowledge', they constitute 'information', which a knowing mind may assimilate, understand, comprehend and incorporate into its own knowledge structures. These structures are not identical for the person uttering the message and the receiver, because each person's knowledge structures are, as Schultz (1967) puts it, 'biographically determined'. Therefore, the knowledge built from the messages can never be exactly the same as the knowledge base from which the messages were uttered.
In common usage, these two terms are frequently used as synonyms, but the task of the academic researcher is to clarify the use of terms so that the field of investigation has a clearly defined vocabulary. The present confusion over 'knowledge management' illustrates this need perfectly.
The consequence of this analysis is that everything outside the mind that can be manipulated in any way can be defined as 'data', if it consists of simple facts, or as 'information', if the data are embedded in a context of relevance to the recipient. Collections of messages, composed in various ways, may be considered as 'information resources' of various kinds - collections of papers in a journal, e-mail messages in an electronic 'folder', manuscript letters in an archive, or whatever. Generally, these are regarded as 'information resources'. Thus, data and information may be managed, and information resources may be managed, but knowledge (i.e., what we know) can never be managed, except by the individual knower and, even then, only imperfectly. The fact is that we often do not know what we know: that we know something may only emerge when we need to employ the knowledge to accomplish something. Much of what we have learnt is apparently forgotten, but can emerge unexpectedly when needed, or even when not needed. In other words we seem to have very little control over 'what we know'
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