On the Nature of Knowledge: Rethinking Popular Assumptions

Knowledge management (KM) has been an increasing focus for both researchers and practitioners for more than a decade. The discussions generally have viewed the goal of KM as the application of technical and organizational capabilities to improve the processes of creating, storing, retrieving, transferring, and applying knowledge. This paper examines two important philosophical relationships that are at the foundation knowledge management: the relationship between tacit and explicit aspects of knowledge and the relationship between information and knowledge. The paper demonstrates that most papers that discuss knowledge management systems discuss these relationships as though there are two types of knowledge and that it is important to distinguish between knowledge and information. This paper challenges these two popular assumptions and suggests alternative viewpoints that may improve our philosophical foundation for the study of knowledge management systems.