Principles of Knowledge Auditing

This book by the experienced Patrick Lambe is aimed at knowledge management (KM) professionals seeking more solid foundations and arguments for the KM audits they conduct. It is ideal for those who seek to align more closely with the practices of other professionals or who wish to enhance their knowledge of KM as a discipline.

???? Go to KMOL, for a Portuguese version of this article.

“There is such a wide variety of meaning in the term knowledge audit as to make it virtually useless without some means of clarifying what is meant by it, what are the target phenomena, and what is its expected outcome.” (p 146)

Patrick Lambe emphasises the importance of clear language in KM, as ambiguity can lead to misunderstandings. He notes the term "knowledge audit" carries multiple meanings, making it essential to specify what is meant by it in any given context.?

The term “audit” is used to describe many practices, each with varying degrees of rigour.

?“If I mean a looser sense of audit but you understand a tighter sense of audit, I can use my audit methodology to persuade you of things that have less intrinsic authority than you think.” (p 77)

The book aims to establish a common frame of reference (not a standard) for professionals to be aware of their approaches and biases, choose the appropriate type of audit, and effectively communicate the results.

Patrick distinguishes between 2 important types of audits: descriptive and prescriptive.?

Prescriptive audits are grounded in the specific context and objectives of the audited organisation, and combine both a function-focused and a macro-level analysis to “generate actionable insights and recommendations for improvement and change”.

This type of audits falls in the category of operational audits. As such, they look at effectiveness, efficiency, economy, equity, environment and ethics.

However, when it comes to KM audits, things become fuzzy immediately with the first one: is KM effectiveness defined by how the organisation carries out the activities and objectives defined for KM, or by how they contribute towards the business?

Chapter 5 looks at the types of phenomena a knowledge audit can focus on. It briefly reviews each one and recommends ways of combining them to overcome their individual limitations.

”Context is everything. Drivers are everything. How I compile and scope my audit in terms of model and target phenomena can be very different depending on my circumstances.

Only once the audit model and target phenomena are identified can we then choose appropriate methods for evidence gathering. The model-phenomena-method (MPM) audit framework [...] represents an initial framework for making decisions about a knowledge audit's scope that is appropriate to an organization's goals and needs. In that framework, choice of audit methods comes last.” (p 79)

Patrick Lambe says that audits focused on KM enablers, KM processes and KM capabilities are indirect types of auditing. As such, their value will be limited because:

• external data used prescriptively as a benchmark will likely be come from a different context and will be comparing the organisation’s reality against a distinct set of needs;
• “generic principles without specific examples (...) have little traction for driving the transformation and change we desire” (p 69).

Chapter 7 describes audit models: discovery review, inventory and participative goal-setting. The latter is very similar to the first in that both are “open-ended and geared toward discovery and learning”. However, while discovery audits are led by auditors who pass the recommendations to management, in participative goal-setting audits the “recipients of the intended change are actively directing the audit, discovery process, and follow through decisions” (p 114). The book contains an interesting case study which nicely illustrates this audit model.

“[I]n KM, robustness flows not from the model of audit (as it does in management accounting) but from the quality of the participation and from the quality, comprehensiveness, and representativeness of the self-evaluations into which a business can be guided.” (p 143)

Chapter 9 details how and why KM audits have evolved. It looks at ISO 30401 (Knowledge management systems — Requirements) and how it adds value, despite its limitations.?

In fact, the author mentions that the standard can be used as a framing instrument for an audit, preferably in combination with other instruments and sources of evidence. He also says that this work should be looked at as the basis for a benchmark assessment audit and not a compliance-oriented assessment one. For Patrick Lambe, The KM Cookbook is a great companion to the ISO 30401 Standard.

The last section of the book is dedicated to the inventory audit, “that most foundational form of knowledge audit”. To do so, Patrick Lambe scrutinises the language used in KM: exposes risky metaphors, unhelpful dualisms, and dangerous ascriptions of value.

To guide an inventory audit, it is critical to have a solid knowledge taxonomy, one which helps us “find and describe good proxies for knowledge use”. However, knowledge management professionals are far from agreeing on such a taxonomy.

When talking or reading about KM one comes across multiple terms associated with knowledge. Each conveys a different meaning to knowledge:?

• asset, resource, capital, convey a meaning of value;?
• artefacts, products, convey one of something which can be controlled;?
• connections, transfer, convey a sense of flow; and,?
• competence and capability, point towards knowledge as an enabler or organisational goals.

The terms we choose influence the way we look at KM and how we structure our KM work. As such, when talking about KM audits, it is important that we explain what we mean by it, i.e. what the focus of the audit will be and how it will be carried out.

“I believe the term knowledge audit does function as a portmanteau term and that it does comprehend better than any alternative the full range of possible activities you might want to perform In an investigation of how knowledge is used in an enterprise. It is ambiguous but it contains addressable ambiguity.” (p 200)?

Knowledge asset is a dangerous expression. In fact, knowledge lacks two critical features associated with the word “asset”: it is not wholly owned by the organisation and it is not tradable in the market.

Looking at knowledge as a resource is also problematic because “resources do not have an absolute value independent of the contexts in which they are used and the services they render” (p 229).

Overall, knowledge as capital is probably the better metaphor.

Note added 17 April to reflect a comment from Patrick Lambe to this review:

"I actually do think resource is a better term than capital (for general purpose use referring to knowledge in general), because capital is such a high level term, and resource can refer to specific things (which is what we need). Asset is fine if we're speaking about specific forms of knowledge that an organisation does actually own and control (e.g. intellectual property)."

“[I]f KM acknowledged the distinction between organizationally owned and nonowned knowledge instead of concealing it, then we might be clearer about practices aimed at managing what we own, and influencing the deployment of the things we do not own.” (p 208)?

On the personal-collective knowledge dualism, Patrick Lambe argues that the virtue is in the middle: functional knowledge, i.e. in the knowledge required by teams and functions. In fact, he writes, individual knowledge takes us to a very detailed audit and it is not always available to the organisation; organisational knowledge is too broad and abstract to lead to any relevant outcomes.

“Paradoxically, organizations can do a lot more than teams or individuals but they know less” (p 272). In addition, an organisation has more knowledge capabilities than teams and individuals, but less knowledge flexibility than teams and even less than individuals.

Another dualism is that of tacit and explicit knowledge. The author defends considering implicit knowledge as a critical middle-step in a continuum that bridges the opposing knowledge forms.

Referring to the famous Nonaka’s SECI model, Patrick Lambe considers it useful as a high-level sensemaking framework but, “as a framework for auditing and managing knowledge types in organizations, it is next to useless”. (p 286)

My key take-aways

KM “mitigates our natural tendencies to?

• work on limited and local knowledge,
• improvise rather than systematize,
• act without reflection, and
• favor our localized silos over broader interests and goals.” (p 3)

Improvisation is very much ingrained in some cultures - like the Portuguese. This perhaps explains why there is frequently so much discomfort in embracing more structured KM practices.

The other three make it crystal clear why my passion and KM experience result in me doing so many projects which are about internal communications, adoption of digital collaboration platforms and creation of knowledge hubs.

In addition, the third point clearly supports the link between KM and asynchronous work as I recently discussed with Sumeet Gayathri Moghe.?

I personally am very sceptical of KM audits where the focus is on checking if systems are in place, if knowledge exists, etc. For me, the most important thing, is that whatever systems exist they are used, whatever knowledge exists it is made available and used. When I do KM audits, I do it to identify opportunities for continuous improvement.

It felt good to read that Patrick Lambe also thinks that “[t]he operational audit’s overt focus on observability and documented conformity against requirements can create an illusion of performance where it does not necessarily exist, and it can suffer from a decoupling between documented practice and how things actually happen in real life” (p 41).

Reinforcing this idea, in the book, Patrick Lambe shares this wonderful quote from Charles D. Shaw (referring to clinical audits): “Change is the measure of audit.”

Herbert Simon’s 1957 definition of an administrative system, described by Patrick Lambe as “a decision-making machine enabled by communications - which meant efficient and effective flows of relevant information and knowledge to decision-makers” (p 81).

The first chapter of the book draws a parallel between the emergence of KM and internal communication. A lot can be learned, the author suggests, from how organisational communication evolved towards a more theory-grounded and audited field.

The path leading to knowledge audits started in the 50’s, and it started with a focus on organisational communication. Back then, and very similarly to what we seek today with knowledge audits, the focus was on ways of observing, measuring and improving the quality of information and knowledge flow and utilisation.?

The link between Knowledge Management and Internal Communications also comes across when looking, as the author suggests, to three concepts in a strand of communications research that sees the communication linked to information flow and control in order to produce effective outcomes. Those three seminal concepts are: feedback for adaptation and fine control, noise, and of an organisation as a system.

Looking at feedback for adaptation and fine control, Patrick Lambe looks at how feedback is used to feed learning cycles, thus contributing to organisational learning and promoting double loop learning.

Considering the noise concept, Patrick Lambe points to the work of Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver who identified three classes of communication problems which may hinder the message flow from transmitter to receiver:

• the technical problem: how accurately the symbols of communication can be transmitted;
• the semantic problem: how precisely those symbols convey the desired meaning;
• the effectiveness problem: how effectively the received meaning affects conduct in the desired way.

"For a discipline that promotes the reuse of existing knowledge, knowledge management (KM) is tremendously forgetful. It is not just that we repeatedly invent the same things over and over again (we do). It is that we reframe older practices as if they are entirely original and new.” (p 23)

“Knowledge management as a discipline is typically peopled by professionals who are aspirational, ethically driven, skilled, persistent, entrepreneurial, and highly committed. (...) They are among the toughest and most resilient people I know.” (p 5)

I would also add generosity and willingness to share as a common treat of KMers, one I recently experienced when interviewing Portuguese-speaking KMers for podcast KMOL.

Final words

A few years ago, I read The Knowledge Manager’s Handbook, authored by Patrick Lambe and Nick Milton. It was a very practical book, written for professionals with little time on their hands and no pre-required knowledge of KM. This book is very much the opposite.?

The author believes “(…) we will not fully understand what knowledge audits are capable of if we do not understand where they come from” and that, because there is so much ambiguity when it comes to KM, it is fundamental to be aware of the language-induced pitfalls. That is why, by the author’s own admission, “this book is partly an exercise in semantics and partly an exercise in archaeology” of ideas and practices, directly or tangentially linked to knowledge auditing and knowledge management.?

It is absolutely impressive the breadth and depth of Patrick Lambe’s research - in KM and related areas such as internal communications, intellectual capital, and information management. Besides all his reading, to inform this tome, he surveyed 150 KM practitioners and canvased the messages exchanged in major KM online forums between 2008 and 2012.

Patrick Lambe has a clear passion for literature and linguistics. He’s an artist as much as he is a KMer; as passionate as he is knowledgeable and experienced.

In parts of the book, the inner passion took over and the writing felt an exploration into the realms of linguistics or a rant over past episodes which did not favourably contribute to the success and good image of KM. Chapter 11, for instance, could have been an appendix or offered as additional reading on his website, thus making for a lighter reading.

As a result, it took me a while to finish reading this book. I am very glad I did it, though: it gave me a broader and richer perspective of KM, and put in words some of the intangible knowledge I formed over the years.