Integrated Knowledge Management

Introduction

In 1987, a paper entitled “Management Support Systems: Towards Integrated Knowledge Management” was published (Zeleny, 1987). The notion of Integrated Knowledge Management (IKM) is more than twenty years old. The need for [data -information – knowledge – wisdom - enlightenment] integration is now greater than ever before (Zeleny, 2005, Zeleny, 2006a, Zeleny, 2006b). In the meantime, numerous strains of knowledge management have been pursued (and abandoned), but fruitful integration of knowledge has not occurred yet. It could be that the prevailing mainstream of KM conceptual development has not sufficiently differentiated between information and knowledge: in fact, knowledge became a label for information, like explicit knowledge, while knowledge itself has been relabeled as tacit knowledge all by Nonaka (1991), taking it into the realm of intangibility, out of the reach of useful measurement.

It is our current purpose to show that knowledge is very tangible and its value is eminently measurable, while the value of information remains difficult to assess, unless it becomes embedded in action (knowledge) as one of its inputs. Only then information attains value, measured indirectly through the value of knowledge (added value of the product of coordinative action). All the rest is exformation, i.e. extraneous, unused, stand-alone information, attaining its value only through some TV encyclopedic quiz, like Jeopardy, and being better handled by a machine program like IBM Watson than by humans.

Knowledge has now become the key source of competitive advantage. The failures of knowledge management (KM) of the past two decades can be traced to the following list of several paradigm-intervening factors:

• 1.

  Absence of useful, operational and measurable definition of knowledge, resulting from its confounding with information, has led to undifferentiated and unsustainable, IT-based mislabeling of knowledge (Carr, 2003; Carr, 2004; Zeleny 2001; Dawson, 2005). Information is not knowledge.

• 2.

  Knowledge itself continues to be approached as a separate, context-free concept (Kazuo & Nonaka, 2006), not properly integrated with data, information and wisdom for the purposes of management/coordination support.

• 3.

  No useful measure of knowledge has been developed and so the field of KM was discredited in practice and its advancement slowed down considerably.

• 4.

  Meaningless classification of knowledge into tacit and explicit – before defining knowledge itself – has driven a generation of well-meaning young researchers into the intellectual cul-de-sac.

• 5.

  Modern management and decision making is increasingly plagued by information overload and a massive exformation build-up. Yet, there can be no knowledge overload.

Information Overload

As information becomes commodity, the information technology and communications revolution generates significant information overload and, as a consequence, attention fragmentation, poor decision making, loss of creativity and innovation as well as declining productivity. While information overload becomes a scourge of modern business, there is never any knowledge overload.

The need to shift the focus from information to knowledge has never been stronger: knowledge can hardly become commodity and there can never be “too much” of it. It would be pointless to shift from information to another form of information – even if labeled as knowledge. It does not matter what we call it, the only thing that matters is the real difference between knowledge and information, i.e. between action and its description. Knowledge can exist only as action and information has no existence outside description of action.