Document (#27049)

Author

Haravu, L.J.

Title

Lectures on knowledge management : paradigms, challenges and opportunities

Imprint

Bangalore : Sarada Ranganathan Endowment for Library science

Year

2002

Pages

204 S

Isbn

81-900957-5-7

Footnote

Rez. in: Knowledge organization 30(2003) no.1, S.42-44 (D. Mercier): "This work is a collection of lecture notes following the 22"d Sarada Ranganathan Endowment Lectures which took place in Bangalore, India, from 4-6 December 2000. This compilation has been divided into four sections: historical introduction, compilation of several definitions about knowledge and its management, impacts of knowledge management (KM) an information professionals and, review of information technologies as tools for knowledge management. The aim of this book is to provide "a succinct overview of various aspects of knowledge management, particularly in companies" (p. v). Each chapter focuses an a dominant text in a specific area. Most of the quoted authors are known consultants in KM. Each chapter is similarly handled: a review of a dominant book, some subject matter from a few other consultants and, last but not least, comments an a few broadly cited cases. Each chapter is uneven with regards to the level of detail provided, and ending summaries, which would have been useful, are missing. The book is structured in two parts containing five chapters each. The first part is theoretical, the second deals with knowledge workers and technologies. Haravu begins the first chapter with a historical overview of information and knowledge management (IKM) essentially based an the review previously made by Drucker (1999). Haravu emphasises the major facts and events of the discipline from the industrial revolution up to the advent of the knowledge economy. On the whole, this book is largely technology-oriented. The lecturer presents micro-economic factors contributing to the economic perspective of knowledge management, focusing an the existing explicit knowledge. This is Haravu's prevailing perspective. He then offers a compilation of definitions from Allee (1997) and Sveiby (1997), both known for their contribution in the area of knowledge evaluation. As many others, Haravu confirms his assumption regarding the distinction between information and knowledge, and the knowledge categories: explicit and tacit, both actions oriented and supported by rules (p. 43). The SECI model (Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995), also known as "knowledge conversion spiral" is described briefly, and the theoretically relational dimension between individual and collectivities is explained. Three SECI linked concepts appear to be missing: contexts in movement, intellectual assets and leadership.
Haravu makes a rather original analogy with Ranganathan's theory of "spiral of subjects development". This will be of particular interest for those working in knowledge organisation. The last third of this chapter covers the Allee's "Knowledge Complexity Framework", defining the Knowledge Archetype, the learning and performance framework, and twelve principles of knowledge management (p. 55-66). In the third chapter, Haravu describes at first and extensively KM interdisciplinary features and its contributive disciplines (and technologies): cognitive science, expert systems, artificial intelligence, knowledge-based systems, computer-supported collaborative work, library and information science, technical writing, document management, decision support systems, semantic networks, relational and object databases, Simulation and organisational science. This combination of disciplines and technologies is aligned with the systematic approach chosen in the first chapter. After a combined definition of knowledge management (Malhotra, 1998; Sveiby, 1997), Haravu surveys three specific approaches of the knowledge economic perspective: core-competency (Godbout, 1998), leveraging and managing intangible assets (Sveiby, 1997), and expanding an organisationas capacity to learn and share knowledge (Allee, 1997). Then, he describes again Sveiby's and Allee's frameworks, largely borrowing from the Sveiby's "six KM strategies" (p. 101). For each approach, he summarizes a case study from the reviewed authors. The final section section is a summary of broadly cited case studies (Buchman Laboratories and Hoffman-Laroche). On a practical basis, Haravu underlines the Impacts of KM practices an knowledge workers, particularly information professionals. The major activity of information professionals is adding value to information: filtering, validating, analysing, synthesising, presenting and prevading facilities to access and use. Leadership in knowledge management processes is rapidly detailed. At the end of this chapter, the author describes information professionals' core competencies required in organisational knowledge management and refer to the Andersen Consulting and Chevron's cases. From this perspective, new collaborative roles in KM for information professionals are omitted.
On the other hand, from the economic perspective of knowledge management, the role of technology is dominant. The last chapter presents, in details, tools and technologies used by, or potentially useful to, KM practitioners. This chapter discusses the Tiwana (2000) framework and cases. This framework has several meta-component categories: knowledge flow, information mapping, information sources, information and knowledge exchange, and intelligent agent and network mining. In summarizing the Tiwana (2000) study, Haravu gives generic characteristics to the most prevailing tools. To downplay the predominance of technologies, Haravu concludes his book with a discussion of three KM technology myths. This compilation of notes is a real patchwork with some sewing mistakes. In order to be able to read and understand it better, one would have to rewrite a detailed table of contents since many numbering errors and incoherence appear in all the chapters. Levels of details are different in each chapter. As one reads along, many details are repeated. Bibliographic references are incomplete and there are no citations for figures or tables. This book looks like a draft companion for those who attended the lecture, but it is not clear why it becomes available as late as two years after the event. KM is a new discipline in constant evolution. In contrast, the book seems to be a demonstration of a mature and stable discipline. In this publication, Haravu fails to display the plurality of paradigmatic KM dimensions, challenges and opportunities. The compilation is not original and reflects the very traditional style of the first generation of KM specialists. Following thousands of books and articles written about KM, this compilation still Shows a systematic or economic perspective of KM, in which the systemic approach is omitted and KM duality ignored. Annotated bibliographies are to be preferred to Haravu's patchwork."

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