KM & RIM: oil & water? Knowledge management (KM) and records and information management (RIM) have their differences, but there is also a lot of common ground. Why hasn't anyone noticed?

• Author: Pemberton, J. Michael
• Position: Knowledge Management, Records and Information Management

At the Core

This article

* compares and contrasts KM and RIM

* examines KM and RIM functions within an organization

* discusses roles for RIM professionals to play in KM initiatives

In the late 1990s, interest in knowledge management (KM) seemed to blossom in the records and information management (RIM) community, as evidenced by the publication of many articles and books, as well as an abundance of seminar and meeting presentations on the topic.

However, that interest seems to have since waned. An informal 2001 survey of 1,342 subscribers of the primary records management list serv (recmgmt-l@lists.ufl.edu) identified only one RIM professional as being in any way "engaged in knowledge management'

There is also little evidence of interest in RIM by the KM community. Examining the indexes of 20 KM books as an informal gauge revealed that "records management" was listed only once.

The KM-RIM connection, then, is fragile at best. Nevertheless, KM continues to be a hot topic at management and information technology conferences and in business journals. Searches for KM as a subject in the principal bibliographic database for business and management, ABI Inform (now "Business Source Premier") indicate a steady increase in KM hits each year.

A recent assessment of KM's position suggests that while ardor in the management community may have cooled slightly, KM continues to be a very active topic in the business literature. As a topic, however, KM has virtually dropped out of the RIM literature in the past two years.

Many organizations have experimented with KM, so it seems unlikely that RIM professionals in those firms have been wholly unaware of it. Given the positive achievements that senior managers have identified with KM (e.g., productivity gains, innovation, improved revenue, and greater competitive edge), it would be ill-advised for RIM professionals not to at least look for a role in their organization's KM projects.

Why have RIM and KM essentially failed to find one another? Is there a misunderstanding about where KM and RIM intersect? What is there about KM that may have turned away RIM professionals? Or is it possible that when it comes to KM, RIM practitioners "just don't get it?" Differences between RIM and KM do exist, but there are also commonalities that could encourage RIM practitioners to consider their potential roles in broader, higher-order, management-endorsed information and knowledge services.

Purposes: KM and RIM

According to a 1998 Gartner report, KM "promotes a collaborative and integrative approach to the creation, capture, organization, and use of an enterprise's information assets [and] includes databases, documents and, most importantly, the uncaptured, tacit experience of individual workers." Such a definition--particularly "creation, capture, organization, and use"--includes RIM interests and skills. On the other hand, concepts such as the "uncaptured, tacit experience of individual workers" seem rather distant from the traditional functions and value systems of RIM.

KM's purpose is generally agreed to be that of leveraging or converting information assets into knowledge of a strategic quality, which, in turn, generates innovation that enables improved revenue and a better strategic and competitive position in the organization's market. The traditional purposes of records management are rather different: Records management is the tactical, systematic application of management principles--particularly control--to the recorded information needed and used--created or received--in the normal and predictable course of an organization's business.

Records, then, are definitely "information assets," yet are records per se--what some would see as mere data--a necessary precursor of the knowledge that induces innovation and greater productivity?

Records documenting transactions that make up the organization's "normal course of business" are central to the smooth running of any managed enterprise. For more than 2,000 years, records have chronicled functions such as requesting, notifying, certifying, authorizing, paying, and routing. They are evidence, or documentation, of daily ongoing business processes taking place, mostly within the organization. The focus of records-as-records then has always been--past tense--transactional in nature and thus represents a type of rear-view-mirror model. In comparison, knowledge has transformational value in that it carries with it the instrumentality to look ahead, to act, and to change something significant in the organization (e.g., new products and services)--a windshield model of what is ahead. Records, then, represent tactical feed-back (what happened in the past); knowledge represents strategic feed-forward (innovative and future courses for the organization).

World View Differences

RIM's primary, traditional interest has been in managing physical records...