Men and measures: capturing knowledge requirements in firms through qualitative system modelling

Knowledge Management (KM) is an issue of great and increasing importance in most if not all areas of managerial endeavour. In this paper, we are concerned with the particular practical difficulty within KM of mapping knowledge in a managed system. This is an important practical issue because without a view of the terrain of explicit and tacit knowledge in the managed system, we have little prospect of planning our managerial interaction. Few if any practical methods exist which reflect the strongly systemic nature of business organizations. We begin by establishing our position with regard to the numerous definitions and perspectives of knowledge in managed systems, and indeed in regard to the disagreements that rack KM over the nature of knowledge itself, where it lies and the role of humans as creators, users and guardians of that knowledge. We relate the nature of system knowledge to well-known taxonomies of knowing what, knowing how, knowing why, knowing who together with the integrated form of knowing in the managed system as a whole. The method presented, Systems Based KM (or SBKM), is based on a non-positivist qualitative method deriving from System Dynamics and it is presented through the medium of a case study of a professional firm.