One Account of the Birth of the Term Knowledge Management

This year will be the 16^th annual KM World in Washington DC, on October 17-19. I plan to be there. I attended the first three and will have been to last 6 or so, I lost count.

The term knowledge management has been around for much longer. There are various tales on how the term got started. Here is one. 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 management has certainly had it sups and downs in the market but my own experience with clients and talking with analysts supports their conclusion.

 

Comments

[JoeRaimondo]

I first encountered the term "knowledge management" in a 1989 edition of Ziff-Davis' PC Computing magazine in an article called "Rethinking the office" by Duncan B. Sutherland, Jr. Duncan is/was a designer and futurist, and from the moment I encountered that term in 1989, the game was on.
Full-text of the article is unavilable--I have the hard copy buried somewhere in my files. Duncan intorduced the term "officing" in the article which he used for a more holistic design ethos necessary for enabling knowledge work. Alas officing never caught on.
You can also dig up this wonder monograph that Duncan edited while working for Matsushita http://www.amazon.com/OFFICing-Bringing-amenity-intelligence-knowledge/dp/4845702975

[bill Ives]

Joe Thanks for sharing this additional information which was new to me. Much appreciated.

[John Maloney]

Hi - This is very silly and harmful. It is what has made KM so challenged over the years. It is why serious business leaders are very suspicious of KM.

Sadly, KM hubris is omnipresent.

First, even a casual look at Google Scholar shows over 2000 mentions of KM from 1900 to 1990.

http://bit.ly/KouFPs

Now, the de facto, widely accepted and comprehensive practice and introduction of KM and its terminology, was by economist Fritz Machlup in the late 1950s.

It was syndicated in the seminal book, "The Production and distribution of Knowledge in the United States" (Princeton 1961). This masterwork presents not only the assessment of the changes affecting the knowledge industry and knowledge management over the past two decades but also his own new insights developed during that period.

http://bit.ly/KovJTk

Personally, we had a KM operation as part of the HP Media Lab that our team founded in Palo Alto in 1988. It was routine. It made sense. KM led to a whole sequence disruptive innovations for HP in the '80s and onward.

Today, we laugh at all the dopey historical and hysterical claims about KM.

-j