(Copyright © 2001 T Bruce Tober)
From the Lascaux Cave Drawings until the computer era - a span of about 27,000 years - KM techniques changed very slightly and extremely slowly. The highlights of those changes were the invention of the encyclopedia in about 370 BC, the invention of the movable type printing press in the 15th century, and the invention of mass communications (via electronic media such as the cinema, radio and eventually TV) in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Such radical improvements in knowledge distribution caused "information glut", an increasingly serious problem in need of an increasingly strong solution. It has been during the computer age that such solutions became viable.
Just how large a problem is information glut? The Web now contains about 7.1 million unique sites (a 50% increase over the previous year's total of 4.7 million), according to the latest research from Dublin, Ohio's Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) This is a non-profit organization providing computer-based cataloguing, reference, resource sharing and preservation services to 38,000 libraries in 76 countries and territories. Public Web sites - those that offer content that is freely accessible by the public - make up about 40% of the total Web.
No longer were notes written on the backs of match books and paper napkins and stored in shoe boxes capable of handling the load. Real, electronic (and preferably relational) databases were needed and devised. But more than that, in that not everyone is capable of creating, let alone effectively using a complex database, a way needed to be found to gather, collate, evaluate and scatter the contents of all the databases within any given organization.
Those databases might be electronic or merely mental. They might be owned by members of one or more organisations. They might be related in any of dozens of relationships. A means needed to be developed so the job could be managed.
"The greatest barrier I have found," said Shenali Samarawickrema, "is changing the attitude of people towards one that is knowledge-friendly, that encourages knowledge-sharing as well as developing the need to know more." Samarawickrema is Chief Knowledge Officer of the Capitol Logistics Management Group, Sri Lanka, which was and is the first company in Sri Lanka to set up a KM unit with a dedicated officer in charge of the program.
"Somehow a lot of people," she explained, "had got used to living in their cosy set up and had become frozen in it so they were reluctant to actually explore the dark unknown to see whether they are good at anything. However, some also seem to think that my team and I have no other business but to poke into theirs."
She believes these behaviors "prevail and are customary in any type of organization". She believes the "biggest challenge is to find ways to create new knowledge and to make the staff voluntarily use it as their own. I feel that this is the biggest task a KM team is faced with.
"Technology developments," she concludes, "are everywhere. Incorporating them into companies is not a problem. Getting people to use them if they are user-friendly is a problem and has to be dealt with carefully."