What’s in a name?

Regular

posted 21 Feb 2005 in Volume 1 Issue 7

By Mark Field

For a long time now, I’ve had a good, intuitive idea of the differences and connections between information management, knowledge management, records management, document management and content management. But I have difficulty in explaining their relationships because, according to their respective practitioners, they are all the same. They can all record everything, enable profile-based sharing and the spontaneous generation of purposeful communities. And that’s just for starters.

Now, I must make clear at this point that I know the readership of Enterprise Information features many people who can tell me the precise similarities and distinctions between these things, but please don’t write or e-mail to enlighten me because, with a few exceptions, you already have, at length, at some conference or other.

If we take a look at all these species of management in terms of larger groupings, document and record management sit well together – ultimately they are about recording transactions, final texts and agreed forms – they were not explicitly devoted to sharing information or knowledge as their prime justification. In turn, knowledge management will not give its disciples an unchallengeable auditable system of documentation – what it can do is provide a set of tools to encourage people to communicate more effectively. Content management, whatever arcane form it once took on, is now web publishing.

Which leaves information management, which, for me, is the biggy. It can claim oversight and direction of document, record and content management, it doesn’t go into the hippy stuff that KM offers, but try running a KM programme entirely by meeting in a wigwam twice a week – it will fall to bits before Wednesday. Someone needs to keep all the incredibly useful unstructured stuff safe for next time without making it sacred and unchallengeable, and do something clever with it, and mix it with other useful stuff, which is just part of information management.

I blame ‘electronicness’. Because you can undertake a limited degree of information sharing in an electronic-records-management system, hey presto it’s a KM system, too. Except it’s not – adding ‘electronic’ to records management doesn’t change the need for records management to provide (often legally required) assurances about properly controlled transactions and auditable histories – it’s a part of the corporate-governance toolkit, it’s not a communications toolkit.

Neither does combining management species change their justifications and purposes. You can’t just stick them in the same pen and wait for them to breed a super-creature. That sort of breeding takes time and can go very wrong. Mixing records and document management doesn’t make them any less concerned with control and curatorship, and neither is a good precondition for high-value exploitation. It is a great idea to mix document and records management precisely because they share concerns for correct corporate governance.

For the same reason, mixing information and knowledge management is also a no-brainer. But it is more complex: because pure (ie, non-electronic) knowledge management is highly social, it can be difficult to connect it to the more methodical devices that have been developed in information management, but since that connection is precisely where the exploitation of information and knowledge happens, it’s worth trying.

There is one very good reason for this conflation of purposes. Money. And complexity. Two reasons, then. Or maybe just one, because large programs with complex components from multiple sources look more expensive than single-tool, single-vendor programs, because multiply-sourced programs look like they need more management and more management means more people, and people cost. True?

If corporate management is perplexed by the complex processes undertaken by records managers and information managers, then it should look for the discipline that can best characterise good knowledge management, and has a modern body of method developed over half a century of information technology that can meet the exacting standards of control required by document and records management: information management. There, I’ve said it.