Patrick:
Thanks for stating so boldly what so few people in the 'knowledge
business' are willing to acknowledge or admit. I for one am resolute in
my belief that knowledge is not a commodity which can be created,
manipulated, stored, distributed or communicated without the direct
intention and effort of a human being.
I am concerned, however, over what I construe from your post as an
assertion that knowledge must precede information. You wrote:
"You need knowledge to comprehend information, e.g. knowledge of medicine
is required to understand the information in a medical reference text."
I would argue that while information is indeed the basis from which
knowledge can emerge, there is no possible way in which knowledge can
exist a priori without a basis in information.
I also have a concern over the assertion that knowledge
"can perish in two ways:
1. the real world changes, and the previous knowledge about the changed
part of the real world perishes (becomes unusable)
2. the last person that held that knowledge loses it (dies, suffers from
Alzheimers's Disease, etc.)"
Although I agree with your second point, I find the first challenging.
While I would agree that the information component of the knowledge
assertion may become invalid, the knowledge--the human capacity to place
information into a useful context--is not necessarily invalid. To borrow
from one of your examples: While the bridge (the information) may indeed
be destroyed, the knowledge of how to get from A to B (an understanding of
the dynamics and constraints of movement from one location to another) is
not destroyed--one could easily build another bridge or follow an
alternate route.
While information is defineable in terms of its structure and its
elements, knowledge is not. I would argue that knowledge is then not a
'quantifiable' thing but instead a Complex Adaptive System that by its
nature arises from the interaction of information, reflection, intent and
action. From that point of view, the term 'knowledge management' is
indeed useless techno-babble. Instead, I would urge us to learn how to
'manage our organizations for knowledge' rather than trying to manage
knowledge itself.
Cheers, Arnold J. Wytenburg
--Arnold Wytenburg <arnold@originalthinking.com>
Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>