Going to School - Knowledge Management Style

In May 2001, Michael Earl wrote about three main categories and seven schools of knowledge management. His article was published in the Journal of Management Information Systems (Vol 18, Issue 1).

The three categories for capturing and sharing knowledge are:

• Technocratic - involved with tooling and the use of technology for knowledge management
  
• Economic - relating knowledge and income
  
• Behavioral -dealing with how to organize to facilitate knowledge capture and exchange
  

Because these categories are so different, Earl pointed out that they are not mutually exclusive, and could be used in conjunction. In fact, doing so should better enable overall knowledge capture and use.

Within each of the categories, Earl posited that there are "schools" or focuses for knowledge management. Earl's seven schools are listed below (with some short descriptions):

• Systems - Part of the technocratic category, focusing on the use of technology and the storing of explicit knowledge in databases and various systems and repositories. The knowledge is typically organized by domain.
  
• Cartographic - Part of the technocratic category, focusing on who the "experts" are, in a company, and how to find and contact them. So, instead of explicit captured knowledge, the tacit knowledge held by individuals is paramount.
  
• Engineering - Part of the technocratic category, focusing on capturing and sharing knowledge for process improvement. In addition, the details and outputs of various processes and knowledge flows are captured. The knowledge in this school is organized by activities with the goal of business process improvement.
  
• Commercial - This is the only "economic" school and focuses on knowledge as a commercial asset. The emphasis is on income, which can be achieved in various ways ... such as limiting access to knowledge, based on payments or other exchanges, or rigorously managing a company's intellectual portfolio (individual know-how, patents, trademarks, etc.).
  
• Organizational - Part of the behavioral category, focusing on building and enabling knowledge-sharing networks and communities of practice, for some business purpose. Earl defines it as a behavioral school "because the essential feature of communities is that they exchange and share knowledge interactively, often in nonroutine, personal, and unstructured ways". For those not familiar with the term "community of practice", it is defined by Etienne Wenger as “groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.”
• Spatial - Part of the behavioral category, focusing on how space is used to facilitate socialization and the exchange of knowledge. This can be achieved by how office buildings are arranged, co-locating individuals working on the same project, etc.
  
• Strategic - Part of the behavioral category, focusing on knowledge (according to Earl) as "the essence of a firm's strategy ... The aim is to build, nurture, and fully exploit knowledge assets through systems, processes, and people and convert them into value as knowledge-based products and services." This may seem like the strategic school rolls all the others into it, and it does. But, what distinguishes it, again according to Earl, "is that knowledge or intellectual capital are viewed as the key resource."
  

My personal focus is the strategic school, but with less interest in the spatial component and more in the systems aspects ... I believe that good collaboration needs to be (and can be) enabled, regardless of the physical environment or physical distances separating teams.

And, how do you do this? Via capturing, publishing and mapping each business group's/community's vocabularies (ontologies) and processes, and understanding that community's organizational structure.