Earl's 7 Knowledge Management Schools

Knowledge, being such slippery and elusive term to define, has led to so many theories and assumptions to prop up with no converge - more confusion and chaos. Knowledge Management Systems (KMS) - some commentators call them Expert Systems (ES) - have been developed to aid the knowledge management efforts. These KMSs try to simulate the intellect of the human expertise in creating, storing, sharing and transferring knowledge. Simply said, KMS is a process, not knowledge itself.
However, the management of this knowledge needs some sort of classification to give some semblance of order. In 2001, Michael Earl tried to map knowledge management into a taxonomy of seven KMS schools, each based on existing and observable practice. This taxonomy grouped these schools into three categories, namely:

• Technocratic
• Economic
• Behavioural

In their supplemental paper to Earl's framework, Deborah Blackman and Steven Henderson (Blackman and Henderson, 2005) have helped summarise the seven schools as follows:

• Systems school. This school puts emphasis on knowledge creation with no help available, that is further validated by esteemed peers, codified and stored in a KMS. To me, this is "learning the hard way". A question arises: What criteria is used to label one an esteemed peer, or who holds these esteemed peers in such high esteem?
• Cartographic school. In this school, KMS identifies only the knower of the tacit knowledge i.e. it is a directory of experts
• Process school. This school consists of two components arising from business process reengineering (BPR) i.e. the description of the process plus output generated by such process. It seems to be a hybrid between systems and cartographic schools.

Earl classified these three schools i.e. process, cartographic and systems in the "technocratic" category. They lack knowledge on business performance improvements, even though this missing knowledge is available within the organization and can be transferred effectively and accurately.

• Commercial school. As the name suggests, this school seeks to market and sell knowledge as a commodity. Unlike the technocratic schools where knowledge is accessed and shared to knowledge seekers, this school restricts knowledge to customers an organization considers profitable. It is the only one Earl categorized as "economic".
• Organizational school. This school focuses on collaborating knowledge in a learning community by strengthening the ties between different knowledge holders. It is a community of practice (CoP).
• Spatial school. This school fronts its argument that modern management practices - such as hierarchical structures -, commercial buildings and technology are an antithesis to a conducive environment for learning, knowledge sharing, discussions and bonding. It suggests that space must be set aside for exciting new ideas to emerge. Thus the name spatial.
• Strategic school. The name says it all. A word of caution though: it doesn't mean that all the other schools cannot support an organization's competitive strategy. The difference of thought with this school compared to others is that in the other schools, not all knowledge is immediately strategic. Also, this school looks at, in addition to the internal improvements and problem solving, the bigger corporate picture.

References

Blackman, D., Henderson, S.(2005), "Know ways in knowledge management", The Learning Organization, Vol.2 No.2, pp.152-168.