The Science of KM

Often KM as a subject in Academia and as a practice in organisations seem to lead completely different and also isolated lives. Both regularly tend to shy away from the multidisciplinary aspects that are at the core of KM. In my opinion KM should embrace its multidisciplinarity because that's excactly what KM should do: network-straddling.

That's why I am suspicious of initiatives where KM is proposed as a scientific discipline in it's own right. It is a discipline all right, the discipline of translating cross-disciplinary insights into good practice for organisations. Management in short. That's not science, that's application, so we should look for the science elsewhere. And that is what this proposal by Angela Nobre, co-founder of the Quaerere SIG at KnowledgeBoard aims at.

She says:
The idea is to explore, to develop and to integrate perspectives on KM
Research coming from the broad areas of human and social sciences - namely from Anthropology, History of Ideas, Philosophy of Science, Cultural Studies,
Political Science and, finaly, Organisational Semiotics, my current research
area. Using Knowledge Economics and Knowledge Management as an integrating matrix, the objective is to focus on learning and innovation issues at
organisational level.

And I would like to add psychology to that, as well as make sure that the role of technology is covered by philosophy of science. From a more managerial perspective (and this is the more applied stuff) I would also like to add to the mix, and then there is life system dynamics and game theory.

This is a daunting list, and therefore a bit more discussion on where to take
this is warranted. I would not like to be looking for a Unified Theory for KM, for reasons stated above, but would like goals that aim for synergy and translation into practical stuff for Km-pros. Building the bridge between Academia (being part of it myself), and the Practicing Alchemists that meddle in the organisations (being one myself).

I think it is necessary to think out the proposal a bit more in another direction as well, otherwise we might end up with too broad a scope and too less focus. I can imagine people being able to contribute to only one or two of the disciplines in the spectrum, as sort of a thematic nucleus in the group, while others are the community bridges in this, perceiving how to connect the one discipline to the other.

Or in other words, we will have to tackle some KM-problems in the area of community-building and content-guidance (I specifically shun the words control and management here), in order to be able to get some work done. As always, you're thoughts are welcome.