Why is Knowledge Management difficult to sell?
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb040769 |
| Date | 01 April 2000 |
| Published date | 01 April 2000 |
| Pages | 10-13 |
| Author | Alan Birks |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management |
Why is Knowledge
Management difficult
to sell?
by Alan Birks
This article is a concise overview of
Knowledge Management - what does the term
mean, who uses KM, what are the benefits?
How do we make the process
work,
and how
does it appeal to others? It is a current topic
that is important to understand and make use
of.
Are you kidding? When a
finance director hears
consultants use words like
'knowledge transformation'
or 'change management'
he starts to count the
spoons...
The trouble, as we all know, is that Knowledge
Management is a process rather than a product
that you can just pick off the shelf and install on
your network. So a company that wants to do it
well is probably going to have to accept some pain
to put it in place and make it work; and pain means
money - which brings even more pain! Corporate
clients are very sensibly not willing to hand money
to consultants without having a pretty good idea of
what they're going to get for it, and in the case of
Knowledge Management that's not always easy to
say. And it is perfectly true that many of
the
early
attempts at Knowledge Management were not
particularly successful, bedevilled as they tend to
be by an excess of jargon and 'consultant-ese',
and with predicted returns on investment that are
sometimes wildly optimistic. You can begin to
see why the CFO might begin to be a little
sceptical.
So why are clients
interested?
Well, as ever, there's the hype. We are going
round the block for the second or third time by
now, but Knowledge Management remains a fairly
hot topic, especially for companies that are strug-
gling to understand the new Internet economy and
what it might mean for them. The idea that many
of the new Internet start-ups are 'knowledge
enterprises' also has an effect, in that these
companies are apparently able to build huge
profits (or at least some prospect of them in the
future) on a very insubstantial foundation com-
pared with traditional 'bricks and mortar'
enterprises. How do they achieve this? By using
their know-how, of course. So they use Knowledge
Management, then? Well, that depends on how you
interpret it.
The rapid growth in e-commerce has certainly led
to a lot of talk about the new 'knowledge
economy', but for the most part the information
that on-line stores deal in is conceptually relatively
simple: who you are, where you live (i.e. how
much you might be willing to spend), what you
have bought in the past - that kind of thing. Some
of the more advanced online stores may try to
suggest other purchases for you to consider before
you leave their site: "people who bought x also
bought y and z", or "if you like a, have you consid-
ered b and c?" and may even attempt to adapt their
marketing strategies on the basis of observed
customer behaviour. Often matching customer
purchase and activity histories with product data
and applying fairly simple business rules does this,
although in some cases more complex analysis is
also brought into play. This can be quite impres-
sive (and sometimes less so), but in the end what's
going on here is not so much Knowledge Manage-
ment as intelligent content management combined
with a fairly traditional approach to the analysis of
management information. Knowledge Manage-
ment, on the other hand, implies taking the total
know-how of the company (its so-called intellec-
tual capital) and somehow harnessing it to make
the enterprise more effective; and that requires
companies to look at far more than financial data
and market research. Most e-enterprises haven't
been around long enough to need to adapt signifi-
cantly (even in Internet time), so it will be a while
yet before we know how savvy they really are.
10—VINE 121
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