Week 3: Knowledge Management or Information Control?

Nancy Dixon states that to her, the goal of Knowledge Management (KM) is to make use of collective knowledge in an organization. She also believes that we have been learning KM since early in the 90s.  I think that KM is as old as human civilization and is a part of our nature to create, collect, protect and disseminate knowledge. 

I work at a medical school and over the years there have been many complaints by students at how much of medicine is based on words with Greek and Latin origins.

The oldest written sources of western medicine are the Hippocratic writings from the 5th and 4th centuries bc, which cover all aspects of medicine at that time and contain numerous medical terms. This was the beginning of the Greek era of the language of medicine, which lasted even after the Roman conquest, since the Romans, who had no similar medical tradition, imported Greek medicine (Wulff, 2004).

When you expand how knowledge was managed from the beginnings of civilization, you find that often Latin, Greek and Even Arabic were used by the educated and the learned individuals of society.  It was one of the first forms of KM in my opinion.  Think of the Catholic services and how for centuries, Latin was used as the language of the Catholic Church.  The use of Latin was a type of KM, in my opinion.

The following is taken from THE CATECHISM EXPLAINED Spirago - Clarke 1899.

Latin is well adapted for the services of the Church, because it is both venerable and mysterious. It is venerable on account of its origin and its antiquity; it is the language in which the praises of God resounded from the lips of Christians during the first centuries. It is a sublime and solemn thought that the holy sacrifice is now offered in the same language, nay, with the very same words as it was offered in times long past in the obscurity of the Catacombs. There is also an element of mystery about the Latin tongue; it is a dead language, not understood by the people. The use of an unknown tongue conveys to the mind of the vulgar that something is going on upon the altar which is past their comprehension, that a mystery is being enacted. 

In the first centuries of Christianity a curtain used to be drawn during the time from the Sanctus to the communion, to conceal the altar from the sight of the worshippers. This is now no longer done, but the use of an unknown tongue has something of the same effect, by inspiring the awe into the minds of the common people. It is a striking fact that Israelites and pagans made use, in the worship of the Deity, of a language with which the multitude were not conversant. The Israelites made use of the ancient Hebrew, the language of the patriarchs; we do not find Our Lord or the apostles censuring this practice. The Greek Church, both orthodox and schismatic, employs the old form of the Greek language for divine service not that spoken at present. The same language is in use in the Russian (so-called orthodox) Church, not the vernacular, which is a Slavonic dialect.

The use of Latin is a means of maintaining unity in the Church, as well as uniformity in her services.

For the use of one and the same language in Catholic churches all over the surface of the globe, is a connecting link binding them to Rome, and making one nations which are separated by diversity of tongues. Latin, as the language of the Church, unites all nations, making them members of God's family, of Christ's kingdom. The altar on earth is a type of the heavenly Jerusalem where a great multitude of all peoples and tongues stand around the throne, praising God. If Latin were not the official language of the Church, deliberations and discussions among bishops assembled at the councils, the mutual exchange of opinions between theologians would be impossible. Moreover, the use of Latin, the language of ancient Rome, is a constant reminder of our dependence on the Holy Roman Church; it recalls to our minds involuntarily the fact that thence, from the Mother Church, the first missionaries came who brought the faith to our shores. 

The use of a dead language is a safeguard against many evils; it is not subject to change, but remains the same to all time. Languages in daily use undergo a continual process of change; words drop out, or their meaning is altered as years go on. If a living language were employed in divine worship heresies and errors would inevitably creep into the Church, and sacred words would be employed in an irreverent or mocking manner by the unbeliever. This is prevented by the use of Latin, at any rate as far as the unlearned are concerned. Yet the Church is far from desiring to keep the people in ignorance of the meaning of her religious services; the decrees of the Council of Trent (22, 8), strictly enjoin upon priests to explain frequently the mysteries and ceremonies of the Mass to the children in schools, and to adults from the pulpit. 

What is interesting about this is that while the Council of Trent enjoined the clergy to explain the Mass to the masses, it was still a use of KM in that the organizational representatives did the filtering of the information.

The Catholic Church is a great example of effective KM because they certainly did:

• Leveraged Explicit Knowledge – the Church certainly captured documented knowledge and created a collections from it – and one of their main priorities was connecting people to content. 
• Leveraged Experiential Knowledge – the Church still focuses on connecting people to people and to give rise to communities and social networks.
• Leveraged Collective Knowledge –the Church decides who is in the conversation and they certainly connect the followers to the decision makers.

When you then come back to the present day, we are in a major era of information access by a significant amount of the common populace – I daresay more than at any other time in history was there the access to so much information by so many.  In this era, KM is definitely much more challenging and organizations must be much more cognizant of how easily and quickly information is shared, broadcast and published.

In my organization, to be honest, much of the information that I collect is not from official sources but from the many gaps that exist within the organizational structure and the lack of effective KM throughout the organization.  I find that  the institution’s lack of transparency doesn't matter because the KM is not effective and important news takes about 48 hours to filter from the top down into general institutional knowledge.

It seems the more important something is to keep from common knowledge – the quicker it becomes common knowledge.  I personally think that knowledge and information should be available and shared; I think censorship and information control is wrong.  Of course, knowledge management need not be negative and controlling but I don’t know of any cases where it isn't a form of control.

After reading this week’s material, I also had to wonder if true KM is possible – it seems that from the beginning of civilization – people have been trying to contain knowledge but where there is knowledge; there are always those who want to access it and inevitably the knowledge is obtained and then shared and disseminated.

The challenge of KM and where KM needs to go then is still exactly as Nancy Dixon has described:

• The movement from seeing learning as an individual’s task which is necessarily conducted in private to increasingly seeing learning as something that must take place in public. That there is benefit not only in the product of “having learned” but in the process of learning as well, because that is where new knowledge is created.
• The movement from a need to know to greater transparency. A recognition that knowledge cannot be segmented or walled off from those who are attempting to address the organization’s difficult issues – that everything is connected.
• The movement from seeing management as controlling what content people have access to, to users control of the content that is critical to their needs.