Process metaphor and knowledge management

Abstract

Purpose

This paper attempts to develop a metaphor to explain knowledge and perhaps the basic construct of knowledge management, in a way that might add to the practical understanding of organisational knowledge.

Design/methodology/approach

The paper explores the notion of knowledge, fact and memory in relation to Parmenidian and Heraclitean approaches to stasis and flux.

Findings

That remembering and imagining can be the same basic process, such that knowledge is created in the present not necessarily retrieved from our technology.

Research limitations/implications

To consider cybernetic approaches to knowledge management based on learning and self‐organisation as well as “knowledge based” technology.

Practical implications

Whilst in information systems we collect, store and retrieve information, in knowledge systems we create, recreate and recreate the recreating. Here, knowledge management relies more on individual and collective learning than the power of the technology.

Originality/value

The paper attempts to consider knowledge as a process of engagement rather than a resource to be “utilised”.

Citation

Rowe, J. (2005), "Process metaphor and knowledge management", Kybernetes, Vol. 34 No. 6, pp. 770-783. https://doi.org/10.1108/03684920510595481