07 December 2005

Knowledge Management As... Another Discipline

In a recent University of Toronto course, taught by Stephen Abram, Stephen was saying how the so-called conceptual progression of "data to information to knowledge to wisdom" is fallacious. Wisdom is by definition elusive and relative, it does not lend itself to be "managed". I agree with Stephen that beyong knowledge, we find behaviours rather than "wisdom".

Whereas Information Management (IM) is concerned with information activities (find, create, receive, acquire, monitor, classify, index - ... - information); Knowledge Management (KM) is concerned with knowledge behaviours: teach, share, learn, act, decide, etc.

I have previously described the IM Problem Space. Similarly, the KM Problem space can be described as follows:




My interest is primarily in IM rather than KM, so I'll stop here. I'll just say that I consider IM and KM as part-overlapping disciplines, seeking to address part-overlapping management spaces.