Knowledge Management: What’s in a Name?

Originally posted 21-May-20

The field of knowledge management is broad. It continues to evolve in parallel with related fields such as: Information Management, Learning and Development, Library Science, Philosophy, and Social Media

Organizations use a variety of terms to describe their efforts. Many people complain that “knowledge management” is a poor term, that it is not possible to manage knowledge, and that other people are turned off by hearing this term. As a result, I have seen or heard many other terms suggested as replacements, including these 50:

1. Best Practice Replication
2. Best Practice Transfer
3. Business Improvement Services
4. Collaboration
5. Collaboration Systems
6. Collective Learning
7. Communities
8. Digital Enterprise
9. Digital Transformation
10. Digital Workplace
11. Enterprise 2.0
12. Enterprise Collaboration
13. Enterprise Content Sourcing
14. Enterprise Learning and Collaboration
15. Enterprise Social
16. Enterprise Social Network
17. Insights
18. Intangible Asset Plan
19. Intellectual Capital
20. Intellectual Property
21. Knowledge and Information Management
22. Knowledge and Information Sharing
23. Knowledge and Learning Processes
24. Knowledge Development
25. Knowledge Enablement
26. Knowledge, Engagement and Collaboration
27. Knowledge Exchange
28. Knowledge Flow Management
29. Knowledge Processing
30. Knowledge Publishing and Curation
31. Knowledge Retention
32. Knowledge Science
33. Knowledge Services
34. Knowledge Sharing
35. Knowledge Sharing and Collaboration
36. Knowledge Transfer
37. Learning and Knowledge Exchange
38. Learning Communities
39. Learning from Experience
40. Management
41. Organizational Effectiveness
42. Post-Industrial Knowledge Age Transformation
43. Performance Management
44. Radical Connectivity
45. Social Business
46. Social Collaboration
47. Social Learning
48. Social Media
49. Social Networking
50. Tackling Wicked Problems

One of the reasons some people claim that “KM is dead” has to do with the name for knowledge management. There are always people saying that we shouldn’t call it knowledge management — that we should call it something else. All of the 50 different names suggested above have some validity. There’s nothing wrong with any of them, but we’re still calling it knowledge management. That’s the label that stuck. Spending a lot of time talking about what we should call it probably isn’t as helpful as worrying about how to do it better.

Knowledge Management has been around as a term for over 25 years, while other terms such as “Enterprise 2.0” have come and gone during that time. So even if it is not the best term, it is a recognized one, and attempts to replace it have not been successful so far. Those organizations that have tried using one of these alternatives usually end up having to explain what the new term means, and often resort to saying something like “that’s what we used to call knowledge management.” If you have to do that, then changing the name didn’t really help.

Nick Milton wrote, ” ‘Knowledge sharing and reuse’ is better than ‘Knowledge sharing,’ but you need to add Knowledge Creation to the list as well, and probably Knowledge Synthesis, and definitely Knowledge Seeking, so by the time you say ‘Knowledge creation and seeking and sharing and synthesis and reuse’ you might as well say ‘Knowledge management.’ Knowledge Management does not imply the management of pieces of knowledge, any more than Time Management means the management of pieces of time. As Etienne Wenger said, ‘If by manage we mean to care for, grow, steward, make more useful, then the term knowledge management is rather apt.’ “

I agree with Nick and Etienne. “Knowledge Management” is a reasonable term to continue using.