The Birth of Knowledge Management

Tom Davenport and Larry Prusak, provide an interesting story about the birth of the term “knowledge management” in their new book, What’s the Big Idea? It seems they were having tea in the spring of 1992 at the Boston Athenaeum, near their Center for Business Innovation office. They frequently adjourned to the Athenaeum, an old Boston private library used by Emerson and Alcott, to discuss their projects. They were working on a research project to look at how organizations could use information as a strategic advantage. Not happy with the term “information,” they discussed the issue over tea.

“While munching a tasty lemon square, Tom argued, ‘We should really be focused on higher value forms of information.’ Finally, Larry looked up and asked. ‘Don’t we really mean knowledge?”

As they say, the rest is history. In the book, Tom and Larry point out that while in some ways the long term success of knowledge management is still to be determined, it has out lasted many other “big ideas” and there are signs that its take up is increasing. They state that knowledge management appears to be headed toward pervasive adoption by organizations. Knowledge managment has certainly had it sups and downs inthe market but my own experience with clients and talking with analysts supports their conclusion.

Comments

[Denham]

Bill,

I would put the birth of KM a little earlier perhaps around 1985. Karl Wiig tells of mounting unease about the narrow scope of expert systems and his groups migration to KM as a theme in 1985.

My first presentation on KM was in 1989 and the field was well on it's way by then as I recall.

Here is a timeline from Debra Amidon:

http://www.entovation.com/images/wellhind.gif

[Bill Ives]

Thanks for your comment and I really appreciate the dialog. In many ways knowledge management goes back to the creation of the early alphabets if not before. I was simply discussing the term itself and what I read in the Davenport and Prusak book. Many people, myself included, were involved in aspects of what became KM under different names, such as performance support, before the term was generally introduced. Wiig was certainly a pioneer and may have used the term before 1992. In his 1995 book he mentions that his first presentation on knowledge management was in 1986. I do not have a copy of this talk to see if he used the term but the title talks about the Management of Knowledge, and perhaps the difference is only a minor semantic one. My experience has been that the concept of knowledge management was co-invented by many people around the late 1980s and early 1990s but I am not sure of the first use of the exact term itself.