Knowledge Management

22 July 2004
I'm queasy in the company of buzzwords, but sometimes there's something behind them that needs to be attended to. 'Knowledge Management' may be one such, if it can be separated from its primarily-business matrix, and be recognized as a label for a class of things that libraries and librarians could and should be exploring and experimenting with. Our long suits are helping people to find the information resources they need, and providing the infrastructure and procedures of store and retrieve information --especially information in traditional print media. We are [have been] much less concerned and involved with what people do with the materials we help them to locate, but everybody has the experience and the continuing problem of having too much information in their personal silos ...and it's high time we recognized that as part of our mandate as 'information professionals'.

A troll of previous occurrences of the KM phrase in other pages at W&L finds 9 pages today, all of them mine and most of them concerned one way or another with the above issues of support for our clients in their forays in the information jungles.

Sue Henczel's Supporting the KM Environment—The Roles, Responsibilities, and Rights of Information Professionals can be read as a clarion call to librarians to reconsider their professional activities and self definitions. I'll try to pull out some of the bits that seem especially resonant or provocative, and add some comments:

quote comment

...while some information professionals have successfully embraced change and moved forward, many others are struggling to find their place in the knowledge management (KM) environments that have emerged within their organizations (we don't generally think of it this way, but are things in library realms emergent in this way? or are we really just business-as-usual?)

many individuals have seen their roles and responsibilities downgraded because they were not perceived as contributing directly to the KM initiatives (I'd argue that we don't have much in the way of "initiatives")

Knowledge management is a management philosophy (and not a part of academia?)

Information professionals are trained to manage information and to provide the most relevant and up-to-date information to their client base (this describes what librarians do pretty well)

They are also trained to ensure that information products and services are aligned with the achievement of organizational objectives. (either a truism or ...well, what are the "organizational objectives"?)

Knowledge management ...consists of the systematic processes that are put into place to identify, create, capture, share, and leverage the knowledge that is needed for an organization to succeed (our emphasis is typically on individual success)

KM initiatives use four primary processes to achieve these aims:
1. identification/discovery
2. creation/acquisition
3. capture/storage/codification/retrieval
4. sharing/transfer/flow (these are easily recast into "information fluency" objectives for individual students)

When working in a knowledge environment, the information professional has three primary roles and responsibilities:
1. to provide information products and services that continually and consistently match the requirements of the organization;
2. to educate information users to ensure that they can access and use the information products and services effectively to maximize the quality and consistency of organizational knowledge; and
3. to facilitate the sharing and transfer of knowledge. (yes, these are what librarians do)

a shift from the traditional concept of providing a service to being part of the organization’s core business. We continue to become highly skilled at information access and delivery, but we lack the overall knowledge of the organization and its operations to participate actively in planning and decision-making (sidestepping the "core business", this does describe a common deficiency of librarian activity and responsibility)

We need to examine our new responsibilities and evaluate where our competencies place us (both in terms of opportunities, and in terms of responsibility to learn new skills)

Consider the above in the context of some extracts from OCLC's Environmental Scan: Pattern Recognition (2004)

quote	comment
...while some information professionals have successfully embraced change and moved forward, many others are struggling to find their place in the knowledge management (KM) environments that have emerged within their organizations	(we don't generally think of it this way, but are things in library realms emergent in this way? or are we really just business-as-usual?)
many individuals have seen their roles and responsibilities downgraded because they were not perceived as contributing directly to the KM initiatives	(I'd argue that we don't have much in the way of "initiatives")
Knowledge management is a management philosophy	(and not a part of academia?)
Information professionals are trained to manage information and to provide the most relevant and up-to-date information to their client base	(this describes what librarians do pretty well)
They are also trained to ensure that information products and services are aligned with the achievement of organizational objectives.	(either a truism or ...well, what are the "organizational objectives"?)
Knowledge management ...consists of the systematic processes that are put into place to identify, create, capture, share, and leverage the knowledge that is needed for an organization to succeed	(our emphasis is typically on individual success)
KM initiatives use four primary processes to achieve these aims: 1. identification/discovery 2. creation/acquisition 3. capture/storage/codification/retrieval 4. sharing/transfer/flow	(these are easily recast into "information fluency" objectives for individual students)
When working in a knowledge environment, the information professional has three primary roles and responsibilities: 1. to provide information products and services that continually and consistently match the requirements of the organization; 2. to educate information users to ensure that they can access and use the information products and services effectively to maximize the quality and consistency of organizational knowledge; and 3. to facilitate the sharing and transfer of knowledge.	(yes, these are what librarians do)
a shift from the traditional concept of providing a service to being part of the organization’s core business. We continue to become highly skilled at information access and delivery, but we lack the overall knowledge of the organization and its operations to participate actively in planning and decision-making	(sidestepping the "core business", this does describe a common deficiency of librarian activity and responsibility)
We need to examine our new responsibilities and evaluate where our competencies place us	(both in terms of opportunities, and in terms of responsibility to learn new skills)