Knowledge management - history teaches us ...

At a recent conference I attended (on TQM) one of the prevailing themes discussed was knowledge management. There are many interesting parallels with TQM discussions over the years – what's it about, what's its function, what does it mean and so on.

History teaches us nothing, as (who was it? Rousseau?) said. We had the discussion over TQM, and not for the first time, and we are having it again with knowledge management, and doubtless not for the last. What I got from the discussions was:

• 1.

  It's not an end in itself. We had so many conversations about how to get TQM initiatives started and sustained, rather than why we should. Knowledge management is either a means to some kind of end – better productivity,sustained success – or it isn't. We found (eventually) that TQM was a means to an end of productivity and customer satisfaction, and we continue to explore the means and ends. But we needed to ask whether it was worth worrying about,and so we do again with knowledge management.

• 2.

  We need to explore what it means. "TQM" serves as a useful acronym. But how total is "total"? Across the organisation? Across the bits which make things? Outside into the supply chain? Is "quality" what we say it is? What the customer says? What the customer expects? Beyond what the customer expects? And by "management" do we mean control? Replication?Leadership? In similar vein, while we are getting familiar with knowledge management, we need to explore what we mean by "knowledge" and what we mean by "management" and what we mean by "management of knowledge". What sort of knowledge? Just the useful stuff? How do we know what the useful stuff is?

• 3.

  It's not about technology. If your measurement equipment isn't calibrated right, you can't get good measurements, and you can't do SPC unless you understand basic rudiments of statistics. But great calibration isn't much use if you are making things that no one wants to buy, and SPC isn't useful unless you measure the right variables.

Knowledge management isn't about information-sharing software. It's about information-sharing propensities and politics. One of the people I was speaking to at the conference was telling me about a wonderful knowledge management system which he has set up in his organisation, which involves short presentations one afternoon a week amongst his senior staff which reflect some particularly interesting problem they encountered or question which occurred to them. No technology in sight, but the occasional glass of wine. That struck me as an intervention which addresses true knowledge dynamics, rather than technological froth.

I doubt if we learned all the lessons over the years in TQM. But we should,in the spirit of continuous improvement, try to consider just what we did learn to better address other managerial interventions in the future.

John Peters