The Business World Discovers the Assets of Librarianship
by Michael E.D. Koenig
and T. Kanti Srikantaiah
Mike Koenig is dean of the College of Information and Computer Science at Long Island University, and simultaneously, dean of the Palmer School of Library and Information Science, a constituent of the College. His past experience includes senior managerial experience at Tradenet, the Institute for Scientific Information, Swets & Zeitlinger, and Pfizer.
Kanti Srikantaiah is associate professor and director of the Center for Knowledge Management in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at Dominion University. His past experience includes information management experience at The World Bank.
A Window of Opportunity
It is no secret that Knowledge Management (KM) is now the largest and most long lasting business trend of recent decades. To librarians the connection between librarianship and KM has long seemed obvious. Indeed, in some fundamental sense it can be argued that KM is librarianship, or at least a direct descendant.
It not difficult to see this family tree—documentation was librarianship with a few more components; information resources management was documentation with a few more components; and knowledge management is information resources management with a few more components. While it seems obvious to us that the skills of librarianship are a central component of KM, the business world has been woefully uninformed and obtuse about that relationship (at least as it seems to those of us in the library world).
Though the KM world has begun to discover the skills associated with librarianship and information science, it does not attribute those needed skills and assets to librarianship. It almost seems as if the business world is trying to carefully avoid the "L" word. There is in fact no animus; it is just that the business world simply doesn't get it. What it calls librarianship is the "T" word—taxonomy. It sounds sexier and more scientific.
However, a current development—KM's maturation into its third stage—may give librarians an opportunity to bridge this gap.
KM has already gone through two stages, with a very clear third stage now emerging. Inherent in that third stage is a recognition (though perhaps disguised) of the importance of librarianship, or at least the skills and assets of librarianship and information science.
Stage One
The initial stage of KM was driven primarily by information technology. Organizations, particularly large international consulting companies, realized that their stock in trade was information and knowledge. Often their proverbial left hand had no idea what the right hand knew and if they could share that knowledge they could avoid reinventing the wheel, underbid their competitors and make more profit. The first stage of KM was about learning how to deploy new technology to accomplish these goals.
During the next phase (what we might call stage 1B), the large international consulting organizations realized that many of their customers shared exactly the same problems, and their expertise in building for themselves could also be a product they could sell to those customers. A new product needs a name and a theme or rationale. The name was "Knowledge Management" and the theme was intellectual capital, which coincidentally had emerged as a hot topic in the business literature only a couple of years earlier; it provided a wonderful rationale for the importance of KM. The first stage might be described as the "if only Texas Instruments knew what Texas Instruments knew" stage, to revisit a much quoted aphorism.
Stage Two
The second stage of KM, described simply, is added recognition of the human and cultural dimensions. This stage might be described as the "if you build it they will come is a fallacy" stage. This was the recognition that "if you build it, they will come" is a recipe that can easily lead to quick and embarrassing failure if human factors are not sufficiently taken into account. As this recognition unfolded, two major themes from the business literature were brought into the KM fold. The first was Peter Senge's 1990 work on the learning organization, titled The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization. The second was Ikujiro Nonaka's 1995 work on tacit knowledge and how to discover and cultivate it, titled The Knowledge Creating Company: How Japanese Companies Create the Dynamics of Innovation. Both were not only about the human factors of KM implementation and use, they were also about knowledge creation and knowledge sharing and communication.
A good marker of the shift to stage two can be seen in the composition of the attendance at the conferences on KM, starting in 1995. The conference is organized by the Conference Board, a non-profit organization that is dedicated to creating and disseminating knowledge about management and the marketplace (www.conferenceboard.org). The early meetings were overwhelmingly populated by IT people. The first noticeable contingent of attendees from human resource (HR) departments showed up in 1998. By 1999 HR was the largest single group.
Stage Three
A good marker of the shift to stage three can be seen by perusing the content of the 2000 and 2001 KMWorld conferences (commercial KM trade shows) organized by Information Today (www.kmworld.com). At KMWorld 2000, a track on content management appeared for the first time. At KMWorld 2001 in October/November, content management was the dominant track, constituting the largest cluster of topics in the conference. Since a good alternate description for the second stage of KM is "it's no good if they don't use it," then perhaps the best description for the new third stage is "it's no good if they can't find it" or "it's no good if they use it but can't find it." Another bellwether is that TFPL's report of their October 2001 CKO (Chief Knowledge Officer) Summit showed that for the first time taxonomies emerged as a full-blown, major topic.
What is still distressing in this welcome development is the lack of recognition in the KM community of the obvious overlap of content management and taxonomy with librarianship and information science. An interesting indicator of that gap was presented at the KMWorld 2001 by members of the staff of the American Productivity and Quality Center (www.apqc.org), an important "opinion leader" organization in the world of KM. The presentation was entitled "Managing Content and Knowledge." Its theme was the critical success factors for successful implementation of KM. The study was based on a rather extensive examination of a number of KM implementations. Two very interesting points emerged directly, and they were the points most heavily stressed. One point
was a high correlation between KM success and having done an earlier "content audit" (i.e., what we would call an "information audit" as pioneered by Woody Horton). The second point, "Taxonomy before Technology," was offered for successful KM implementation.
What was even more interesting was what emerged indirectly. A number of examples/case studies were briefly described. One of those was the Washington State Library's implementation of a system to deliver state agency and related information to small business in particular and to the public at large. Some dollar figures were given, and the Washington State Library project was striking indeed for its impact per dollar, a fact commented upon by the audience. To those few from the library and information science community in the audience, the phenomenon was not surprising. After all, the project had a running head start; it was spearheaded by librarians with a professional education in content management. While there was no opportunity to ask in public (because the content-filled session ran overtime), the question that obviously occurred was: Had the team examined whether the central involvement of such staff was also a generic critical success factor? The answer, delivered privately after the talk, was "yes." The next question we have to ask ourselves is: Why wasn't this information revealed in the presentation?
 The Three Stages of KM
1. Information Technology, Intellectual Capital and the Internet (intranet, extranet, etc.) " by the Internet out of Intellectual Capital"
2. Tacit Knowledge, Communities of Practice, Organizational Culture, the Learning Organization and Human Resources
Nonaka's (Tacit Knowledge) and Senge's (The Learning Organization) work already existed, but was latterly pulled into the mainstream of KM.
3. (Enterprise) Content Management and Taxonomies. The discovery of LIS (Library and Information Science). |
Ramifications for the Field
This article doesn't intend to replow the field of pointing out opportunities provided by KM or encouraging the librarian to take advantage of the KM opportunity. Judith Field eloquently made these points in her article "Information + Technology + YOU Equals Knowledge Management" (see Information Outlook, September 1998). As she put it, "KM is the new competitive asset" that " if fully implemented has the potential to make our future as a profession both exciting and very rewarding." But there are some urgent ramifications emanating from the emergence of the third stage of KM that need to be made clearly and forcefully.
First, get over it and get involved. "Get over it" means don't waste time (like a recent extensive discussion on the Jesse listserv) on what knowledge means and what KM is or isn't, or whether it is a good descriptor. It's not, but it is what the folks with budget authority choose to use. Nor should we waste time bemoaning the lack of recognition revealed in the far too typical incident described above. " Get involved" of course means seize the opportunity offered by the third stage of KM.
If one looks at the program of any of the KM conferences, the "L" word is conspicuously absent. The business world doesn't get the connection. The business world connects organizing information with taxonomies, and in turn connects taxonomies with the natural sciences. If business professionals could visualize what they have in mind when they talk about taxonomies, what would constitute that picture is something very similar to MESH, the carefully structured compendium of MEdical Subject Headings compiled by the National Library of Medicine. But there is precious little awareness that taxonomies and classificatory structures like MESH are the natural domain of librarians. Taxonomies are perceived as emanating from natural scientists, not from librarians. A token of this lack of comprehension is that a conference speaker, who admitted that the involvement of librarians was a critical success factor, said only a few sentences later "but content management and librarianship aren't the same thing." The response was, "Can you give me a better two word description of what librarianship is about than 'content management?' If you can, I'll host you to a very handsome dinner." To be sure, content management and librarianship are not a one-to-one relationship, but the area of core overlap is substantial and critical. The challenger and the challengee have been in contact since, primarily on related issues, and while the challenge has been repeated, it has yet to be met.
The most obvious lesson, therefore, is that while the third stage may be about content management and taxonomies, and of course that domain is fundamentally Library and Information Science 101, "they" don't know that. We have to let them know and promote our expertise and KM domain knowledge. There is a window of opportunity here now, and if we don't take advantage of it, it will close soon and close permanently. That is the principal and overwhelmingly important lesson.
An important corollary is that one area where information professionals can and should play a central role is in software selection. Our expertise is central in evaluating most KM software. Most hot, new KM software packages are of two types. By way of illustration, 25 software packages were submitted for the KM Promise Award at the KMWorld 2001 Conference. They provide a snapshot of where the vendors think the field is going, and where they think there is a need they can address. Those 25 software packages fell chiefly into two clear and dominant clusters: programs that attempted in some algorithmic fashion to structure and index a body of documents and "communities of practice"/"yellow pages" programs that attempted some version of identifying who in the organization or the extended organization possessed what subject knowledge or expertise, and then facilitating an appropriate linkage. The first cluster is very clearly stage 3. While the second cluster is obviously stage 2, it also has, in that the programs attempt to recognize and classify expertise, stage 3 characteristics. No program from either cluster should be selected by an organization without the central involvement of information professionals who are familiar with taxonomies, thesauri, indexes and the world of textual information retrieval in general.
The third stage of KM presents a window of opportunity of huge proportions for our profession—perhaps the greatest opportunity that it has even been offered. That window is here now, but if we don't take advantage of it, it will close soon and close permanently. And then others will occupy the turf.
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