What is knowledge and can it be managed?

Philosophical and linguistic debates about the nature of knowledge, information and data should be of more than academic interest to the practice of knowledge management. Grounds are proposed for showing that not all enterprise-critical knowledge can be captured and transferred by the use of data warehouses or knowledge repositories. A key difference highlighted is that between the natural execution of a task and the ability to talk about a task which is discussed as a distinction between ‘thrown’ and ‘breakdown’ behaviour. It is shown that this contrast renders even that which can be codified an incomplete representation of the knowledge concerned. Knowledge management must therefore concern itself with both tangible issues and artefacts (such as codified representations that can be secured) and intangible features such as the skills which people require to interpret and exploit those representations. Furthermore, as organisational structures and procedures themselves represent codified knowledge, they must be designed to be inherently changeable in order to permit the enterprise continuously to adapt as new knowledge is acquired.