Scientometrics, Knowledge Management, and Social Network Analysis

I attended a Knowledge Management workshop held by the Singapore Civil Service College last Thursday and Friday. The trainer, Christopher Tan, mentioned that Knowledge Management has gotten a bad name among organizations as it was an over-used term by IT companies which were selling IT solutions. IT companies were selling packages of expensive solution which included so many modules that may not be needed by the organizations.

This also leads to the tendencies of organizations in seeing Knowledge Management as a subset of Information Technology Initiative, while in fact IT is only an enabler for Knowledge Management.

Another thing is that Knowledge Management is also often perceived as an initiative to “take away” jobs from people (i.e. if there is a proper knowledge management system, turnover of manpower effects will be very little). This, I think, is true.

I think this may be some of the reasons why Knowledge Management practicioners are not very willing to call what they are doing as Knowledge Management as mentioned by Graham.