E-learning: The hitchhiker's guide to knowledge management - electronic learning - Column

T+D, June, 2002 by Kevin Oakes, Raghavan Rengarajan

I often get asked how the discipline of knowledge management will interface with e-learning, and vice versa. It's inevitable that knowledge management technologies and learning technologies will merge. But to understand fully why they will merge, it's important to understand, fully, what knowledge management is.

In the current knowledge economy, knowledge management is one of the most common catchphrases used by vendors to get the attention of corporate executives. Yet so far, there hasn't been an industry-wide consensus of what KM really is. Because the phrase is used to cover a wide spectrum of corporate needs, almost any product or technology even remotely associated with knowledge is often positioned as an aspect of a KM solution.

Lack of precision in KM terminology doesn't mean that we can afford to overlook the practical needs of corporations in that area. To sustain and improve their bottom line, companies are intrigued by solutions that enable efficient, just-in-rime access to the tangible and the tacit knowledge available in their extended enterprises. That's one of the key promises of knowledge management.

Defining the terms

Let's try first to understand what knowledge is before we get into the question of how to manage it. Though some people use information and knowledge interchangeably, it's important to realize they aren't the same. Information basically refers to any content that can be communicated. That's true independent of the size and format of the content or the method used to communicate it. Knowledge refers to content communicated in a context. In other words, knowledge includes information, as well as the context that makes the information useful and meaningful. Think about the people we call knowledgeable. A knowledgeable person not only carries a lot of information in his or her head, but is also capable of identifying and communicating the information that's most relevant for a given situation.

There are two main types of knowledge. Some knowledge in an enterprise is tangible, in the sense that it's captured and represented physically in some form--for example, digitally as a Word document. Transferring that tangible knowledge to other people doesn't require a human being to deliver it; it can be consumed individually by the user.

In most organizations, the majority of knowledge is tacit--meaning it resides only in the heads of the employees. I like to estimate that as much as 80 percent of the knowledge in any company is tacit. Unfortunately for most of those companies, when an employee walks out of the door, a significant amount of knowledge goes with him or her.

Transferring tacit knowledge always requires human interaction. In most companies, that's an ad-hoc process--such as, leaning over the cubicle wall--that's rarely captured and reused. The goal of a knowledge management system is to provide order to such chaos, but a true KM solution must address both the management and the transfer of tangible as well as tacit knowledge.

Managing tangible knowledge

The content associated with tangible knowledge can be categorized into two camps: structured or unstructured. Self-paced e-learning courses and traditional textbooks are good examples of structured content. Short Word documents and individual email messages are examples of unstructured content. The tangible knowledge of an enterprise always consists of a combination of structured and unstructured content, with a heavy emphasis on unstructured. How many emails fly around in your organization daily?

To manage structured and unstructured tangible knowledge effectively, several frameworks have to be in place.

Organization. Typically, employees waste a huge amount of time each day because they don't know where to find information. To alleviate that, all of the structured and unstructured content must be organized in a meaningful way so that it can be located easily at the moment of need. That's the promise of many KM systems.

One way to organize content is through a hierarchy that mirrors the structure of the company. For example, an enterprise might organize its content by departments, then by functional groups within each department, then by areas of interest within each functional group, then by subareas within each area, and so on. The key purpose of that organization method is to make it easy to locate content by browsing the context--a business or functional category the content belongs to.

Effective search. Robust searching is critical to accessing knowledge easily. Content is usually searched based on metadata (information about the content) and keywords. That type of search can also be combined with category-based browsing to locate the relevant content faster. In that case, the browsed category may be used as a scope so that the search happens within the given context.

Content repository. Organizing and effective searching of content require a common content repository with the capability to hold a wide variety of content formats. At the same time, the repository should make it possible to organize and locate content that may be maintained physically in an external system. In such instances, the common repository might contain only the metadata used to organize and locate the content and rely on an external reference to actually access the content.