For decades, knowledge management has been touted as this critical discipline of effectively managing intellectual capital within organizations. As we transitioned from an industrialized society to an informatized one, the imperative of carefully governing capital has remained the same – only the whats and hows have changed. The idea is to treat intellectual property, defined as human skills and the knowledge they have enabled to create, like any other.

The goal is to create a living record of knowledge and make it available to the right people at the right time, for improved decision-making and higher efficiencies within and across organizations. It’s like science but for businesses, establishing a body of knowledge and contributing to it through findings from the applied research that is everyday practice. It’s the first step toward building a learning organization, one that is skilled at creating, acquiring, and transferring knowledge in support of its strategic goals (Garvin et al., 2008).

If you’re able to transfer everything you know onto some repository that just anyone can replicate, then you’re essentially hanging the noose around your own neck, career-wise.

Knowledge management versus employee value

For employees, however, those who make the creation of organizational knowledge possible in the first place through years of development of their professional skills, there appears to be an inherent conflict of interest in supporting such initiatives. The most glaring one is the disconnect between making all your tacit knowledge explicitly available to your employers and colleagues and the elusive concept of becoming an irreplaceable contributor. Think about it. If you’re able to transfer everything you know onto some repository that just anyone can replicate – because it’s a publicly available recipe book for competent work – then you’re essentially hanging the noose around your own neck, career-wise. From an employer’s perspective, what good are you after you’ve run the well dry?

But there’s hope yet for those interested in staying employed. Firstly, it is one’s ability to generate new knowledge for the benefit of the organization that is truly important, not the knowledge itself. Of course, any manager can teach epistemological principles, but connecting the dots between pieces of information and turning them into actionable knowledge is a completely different domain.

More importantly, in Gray’s (2001) investigation into the impact of knowledge management on power and control, he discovered that net-contributors (in contrast with net-reusers of knowledge-based work) to KM systems become less interchangeable with other employees – as long as they in management positions. 

References

Garvin, D., Edmonson, A., & Gino, F. (2008, March). Is yours a learning organization? Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2008/03/is-yours-a-learning-organization  

Gray, P. H. (2001). The impact of knowledge repositories on power and control in the workplace. Information Technology & People, 14(4), 368-384.