This is a good workmanlike book for students and training courses. The authors provide a clear simple outline of the growth of the knowledge management (KM) business in the UK, picking up on change, technology, learning organisations, e‐commerce, and quality management. This is the “knowledge context”, where companies have realised how information/knowledge intensive they are, and how information/knowledge is a key contributor to innovation, competitive advantage, and the management of change. It is a world where knowledge is increasingly represented as value, as intellectual capital (this includes patents and copyrights as well as know‐how and goodwill) and intangible assets, where corporate information needs to be managed effectively so that strategies and processes work, and where tacit knowledge is identified and drawn out as explicit knowledge, so that corporate memory can outlive a fast‐changing workforce.
This is a world we all recognise from what we see and know and read – writers like Nonaka and Takeuchi, Davenport, Senge, Skyrme, Boisot, and Wiig have described it, and what they say matches to the many management developments and fashions (TQM, BPR, ISO compliance, virtual teams, cultural values). Abell (principal consultant and director at TFPL Ltd, a research and training consultancy) and Oxbrow (chief executive of TFPL Ltd) base much of the book on what for them, and for many readers (these will be information professionals at various stages of their careers) too, will be one of the most interesting challenges: how the information professional fits in, keeps up with, finds a place in, demonstrates relevance to, the knowledge economy.
At face value, information professionals should have pride of place. Usually, often, they are marginalised, perceived as “library and information” people lacking the skills and knowledge to engage competitively in the corporate world. These gaps include a lack of business knowledge, of understanding between information and business objectives, poor team and leadership skills – in a word, a lack of management skills. Abell and Oxbrow have carried out research (cited in the book) which indicates that information professionals have low expectations of themselves in this context, and that people in management have low expectations of information professionals. This strikes me as hitting the challenge for the information professional and I was hoping to find it examined in the book.
The authors do their best, even though you come away with a slight sense of despair. Describing the changing context is fine. There is an attractive prima facie logic in having information professionals at the heart of the knowledge economy. A lot of the traditional and current skills and knowledge of information professionals (acquiring, creating, organising, storing, retrieving, sharing information) are undeniably at the centre of decision‐making and creative innovation in private and public sector organisations. There is internal and external information, there are Intranets and the Internet, there is the value of information (for cutting duplication, assisting problem‐solving, providing customer and supplier data) – all this is self‐evident. “So why isn’t it happening?” (a question asked by the authors).
Their response to this is, first, to identify those skills which, in their view and that of their many research respondents, significantly move information professionals (library professionals is an obsolescent term) on to information managers and then on further still to knowledge professionals. Such people have many titles – from information analysts and researchers, auditors and strategists to chief knowledge officers. So what does it all add up to? There are examples in the private sector and public sector case studies (the whole of Part 4) of the many organisations (financial and professional services, oil and law, government and academic) of where KM has taken off, but these are more examples of organisations where KM has been developed rather than a demonstration of the success of information professionals in mastering the managerial skills which they need to function well in a KM environment. In fact many of the case studies mention information professionals only obliquely. This is not a criticism: exactly the opposite it is revealing. It appears to suggest that information professionals are not achieving a successful transition from information work to knowledge work, and that the low expectations on all sides are coming true.
It is hard to identify exactly what skills and knowledge Abell and Oxbrow advocate for the information professional (in order to become a knowledge professional) which are not also, equally, relevant to professionals of any kind: manager; financier; lawyer; business unit boss; researcher; consultant; adviser; document manager; system operator; and network coordinator.
The skills and knowledge identified for the information professional are: knowing information needs; mapping and auditing information flow; helping to underpin innovation with relevant and timely information; working in teams; and developing networks and support systems for flexible organisations.
All these are skills and knowledge which any manager needs these days. So, while it is good to read in the book that information professionals have these skills and can develop and promote them further, you come away with a feeling that these are now recognised as so necessary by every effective manager that the case for the information professional taking the high ground of knowledge professional is mere special pleading.
TFPL should know about skills and knowledge: after all it is their business. What are the top skills or competencies for KM in their view? Business awareness and understanding, communication, IT literacy, leadership, change management, flexibility, tenacity, determination … It is really like reading about generic managerial competencies. This is a measure of how information and knowledge have taken such undeniable centre ground in corporate life (both rhetoric and reality, because, as well as value‐added information, there is a lot of mis/disinformation and spin, as well as information glut) that it has become difficult, if not impossible, to sustain the partisan argument for the information professional any more.
They are one group of many to interest themselves in KM, but the territory is up for grabs by everyone, and always has been. Where intellectual capital is concerned, for instance, information professionals share expertise with accountants and lawyers, and where systems to support processes and decision making, they share it with managers of all kinds, as well as other specialists like network developers, software and Web site developers and, where systems support supply chain management, they share it with supply chain managers and people in customer relationship marketing. Arguably, too, the best stuff being written and done is not always, and sometimes not ever, being done by information professionals, unless they happen also to be people who have taken on information skills for themselves.
This is, then, a very interesting and timely book. On a simple level, it opens up the KM field well, above all for students, and for this reason will find its way into academic collections. Its four sections (the knowledge context, creating knowledge‐based environments, the role of information management in KM, and the case studies) are clear and logical. The emphasis on the skills and knowledge will be of particular interest to people in training and development (even if generic). On a deeper level, what we have here is a belwether to the self‐concept and expectations of the information profession, and the perception it appears to have among other professions.
There is a self‐deceiving logic (not necessarily shared by the book, but implicit in it) that simply being an information professional entitles the library and information profession to claim a special place in the knowledge economy. There is plenty of evidence that rivals have got there first, or even have always been there. Glorious exceptions abound as to successful IM people who have self‐transcended into KM people (there is a logic there that deserves examination), but the impression you get, as you look at the profession, as well as read the book, is that wish‐fulfilment is no substitute for tangible progress.
