Ronald Maier
Springer, 2001
ISBN 3540434062 (boards)
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"The major problem with intellectual capital is that it has legs and walks home every day." So say Ioana Rus and Mikael Lindvall of the Fraunhofer Institute, Maryland, in a recent issue (May/June 2002) of IEEE Software devoted to Knowledge Management (KM). In other words, KM has always existed in business - it consisted of managing the people who had the knowledge. And as Peter Senge wrote in his seminal The Fifth Discipline (back in 1990), "organizations learn only through individuals who learn." So in that case, is there anything substantial and definite to be said about KM? Senge's is one of the many books, research papers and industrial articles referenced in Maier's admirably clear text and comprehensive bibliography (though in so wordy a field, it is a pity that he doesn't also provide an author index). And if there is one thing that cannot be said of this chunky volume, it is that it is vague or insubstantial. What is more, unlike Nonaka and Teece's Managing Industrial Knowledge, Maier offers a unified approach to the whole field, not just to the technologies that support it. He has succeeded in providing an excellent introduction, a scholarly review of progress in the field, and a detailed industrial research report on KM tools and systems, all at once.
Part A provides a brief introduction, motivating the book, defining its goals, and describing its approach.
Part B forms about half the book, and it reviews both the concepts of knowledge and KM, and the theory of KM systems, including their strategy, organization, contents and systems, and economics: quite a tour de force, and very welcome.
Part C then looks at what you might have expected from the title, namely the state of practice of KM tools. It starts with a tour of no less than 11 surveys by other organizations, and goes on to describe Maier's own research. A chapter is devoted to the research design; then the structure repeats that of Part B, presenting the findings for strategy, organization, systems, and economics of KM in about 500 top German companies.
Part D concludes with a description of four 'Scenarios', essentially four types of organization that fall out of the empirical study. These are the KM starter; the centralized 'market and hierarchy'; the decentralized 'network and community'; and the personal 'idea and individual'.
The book ends with a brief 'Outlook', a view on what KM systems actually are and how they will probably be deployed:
'Knowledge management systems neither contain knowledge, nor do they manage it.' (author's emphasis).
Maier is thus quite clear about the criticism levelled at the field, and robust in its defence. The problem is twofold: the definition issue, and the fact that KM systems have yet to prove they can really cut the mustard. There are perfectly good systems in the world that cannot do what they say on the tin; for instance, air traffic control does many things, but controlling aircraft is not one of them. Pilots and avionics suites control planes; controllers can ask them to modify their behaviour, as the recent horrifying head-on crash over Lake Constance demonstrates all too clearly. Critics of KM can thus quite rightly point out that KM does all sorts of woolly things like facilitating knowledge transfer, that nobody can quite define. They are helped in their attack by the fact that the commercial offerings all do different things with their own definitions of the field. Obviously, providing workers with mobile phones, notebooks, PDAs and other gadgetry does not automatically make anyone knowledgeable, or supply any knowledge directly. Worse, organizations have been slow to put adequate measures of success in place. Few organizations are much above CMM Levels 1 or 2 in their primary business processes; so it is no surprise that they don't have good metrics on KM either. As Maier says,
'Instead of an exclusive focus on financial measures, management .. have to integrate ideas, methods and instruments developed in the intellectual capital approach.'
Some hope, perhaps, but times do change.
In other areas there are positive things that can be done, and that are increasingly being tried in industry. These include office architecture designed with KM in mind, since
'Space management can be highly effective and even prove more useful than the most advanced ICT system as good social relationships often are positively correlated with personal encounters.'
Which being interpreted means, if you're in a nice office and you can sit down and have a coffee and a chat with knowledgeable colleagues, you'll likely learn more than if you sit at a screen.
Helps include an interesting and long list of KM tools and their vendors, with URLs; navigation diagrams explaining the structure and contents of each part of the book; an introductory paragraph summarizing each chapter; and some half-table, half-diagram models of numerous aspects of the argument, including KM tasks, architectures, and scenario, all of which enable the reader to compare and contrast the detailed coverage of alternative approaches.
Has Maier succeeded in proving that Knowledge Management is a genuine engineering discipline? Perhaps the jury is still out on that, but he has certainly shown that there are interesting, important, and practical problems to be solved out here in industry. There may well be a lot of academic pussyfooting and management-speak around, but as the concluding Outlook chapter makes clear, there are solid things on the agenda not just for research but for investment in new commercial-off-the-shelf tools:
'The majority of organizations will wait for near "out-of-the-box" KMS solutions that offer partial support of KMS functionality and can be integrated into the existing ICT infrastructure. Enterprise knowledge portals, KMS platforms as well as KM-enhanced Intranet solutions can be seen as the most promising candidates to deliver value without huge investments to customize the solutions.'
Maier thus characteristically sounds a note both of caution and of optimism: there are real opportunities out there; and even if the pundits seem to be all mouth and no trouser today, tomorrow will be different.
The audience for this book is not defined in the preface or the introduction, and this is perhaps revealing. What the preface does say is "The book presents the results of a four-year research project", which does summarize the character of Maier's work: a large, serious, professional academic report, like a Ph.D. thesis grown up. Fortunately however, the book is sufficiently broad and deep to offer something to almost everyone. Knowledge Management executives will get a reflective look at what people are and ought to be doing, and an efficient survey of tools and techniques. Students and researchers will get a detailed tour of the field, and a good modern reading list. Engineers will get a careful introduction to the problems of KM in theory and practice. Librarians buying this book will perhaps get a wider than usual readership for such a text.
© Ian Alexander, September 2001