(Copyright © 2001 T Bruce Tober)
Many a pundit has said, "There ain't nothing new under the sun". And that's just as true of today's "next big thing," Knowledge Management, as it is of the latest incarnation of a Frankenstein's monster movie.
From the earliest days of mankind, shaman and other tribal elders collected stories and other information in an effort to keep the answers from "blowin' in the wind". They distributed their wealth of data verbally via what might today be called "oral histories".
The paintings in the Lascaux Cave in France and elsewhere, which date from 25,000 to 4,000 BC, may well have been mankind's first attempt at implementing what has become today's big buzzword, "Knowledge Management". It's certainly one of the first.
As Reilly Atkinson said in a KM discussion group recently, "the first knowledge-sharing technologies were speech and writing. Then there was the famous library in Alexandria -- which burned down, and by its absence contributed to the malaise of the Dark Ages in Europe."
Atkinson has been in the software and quantitative consulting business for thirty years. As a staffer, small company executive and sole proprietor, he has worked with Fortune 100 as well as small companies in sales forecasting, market research, and strategic use of data and information. He's also a PhD physicist, and only somewhat reluctantly admits to being "a sometimes working jazz pianist".
Atkinson argues that "Gutenberg broke the game wide open with the technology of the printing press. The chain of technical innovation that enabled knowledge-sharing continued unabated - the rotary press, telephones, radios, television, audio-visual aids for teachers, computers ... If it weren't for knowledge sharing, there would be no civilization, no culture. Knowledge sharing began in the far reaches of history, kept going and allowed us to prosper", claims the consultant.
He doesn't see this as either boring or irrelevant, but instead poses further questions. "Is the knowledge sharing of the brave new economy a direct extension of historical practices? Or is it fundamentally new?"
There is plenty of evidence of KM in history.
Starting at about 4,000 BC, some of the earliest examples of a writing system came into being. These were the wedge-shaped cuneiforms of the Sumerian people. Most of the few remaining clay tablets containing cuneiform are lists of supplies and financial records. Obviously those early Sumerian bean-counters were getting into KM.
By about 500 BC, the ancient Greeks were using an alphabet very much like our own. And in about 370 BC, Plato's nephew and disciple, Speusippus, devised an encyclopedia-like work to record permanently the master's lectures on natural history, mathematics, and philosophy.
Aristotle also made one of the first "modern" attempts at KM. He sought to bring all existing knowledge together in a series of books. His works, though not conceived as a unit, do form a virtually encyclopedic body of knowledge and theory. Aristotle's wide-ranging writings included works on logic, metaphysics, biology, mathematics, psychology, ethics, politics, rhetoric, and literary aesthetics.
The Greeks believed that unification and exploitation of knowledge, and improvement of thinking, were primary objectives of education.
The next such attempt was by the Roman writer, Marcus Terentius Varro (116-27 BC). He wrote a nine-volume work on the arts and sciences called Disciplinae (disciplines). These were, what might well be called the first real encyclopedias.
Then came the next most earthshaking event in the KM progression from cave painting to computer software implementations, the invention of movable type in the 15th century.
No other innovation until the invention of the telephone, came close to empowering people to collect and distribute knowledge as easily and as rapidly. As the centuries moved forward and information went from doubling every few centuries to doubling every few decades (in the 20th Century), we began suffering from information glut. The development of the Internet in the 1960s (and more specifically, the World Wide Web in the 1990s) was an attempt to remedy the overload. Encyclopedias and other collections of books and information media in electronic form were likewise, attempts to fix the problem.
Collecting, collating and distributing the information in those ways worked wonders. But in some ways they went too far, providing too much information. Organizations found they needed information which was more specific to themselves and the work they did. Hence the emphasis on KM.
KM involves the collection and distribution of knowledge. But collecting and distributing information are not all that's involved in KM, obviously.
What the cave paintings and subsequent move to alphabetic writing indicate, more than anything else is that our forebears may have thought they were suffering from what is today called "information overload" or "information glut". They found, as we have, that to overcome this not-so-modern malaise is simply a process leading from Knowledge Creation to Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Storage and on to Knowledge Retrieval.
In very simple terms, KM is illustrative of there being nothing new under the sun.