Differences between Knowledge and Information Management

Practices: Empirical Investigation

Michal Krčál

and Michal Kubiš

Faculty of Economics and Administration, Department of Corporate Economics,

Masaryk University, Lipová 41a, Brno, Czech Republic

Keywords: Knowledge Management, Information Management, Comparison, Information Systems.

Abstract: In Knowledge Management (KM) discipline, the nature of KM itself has long been discussed and

sometimes even its existence and meaning have been questioned. At the same time, research focusing on the

difference between KM and Information Management (IM) was scarce. Therefore we tried through

empirical investigation of differences between KM and IM to distinguish the KM from IM and to try to

draw a distinct line between both approaches. To fulfil our goal we employed exploratory inductive

qualitative research design as not many studies have tried to empirically distinguish KM from IM. For data

gathering we used expert semi-structured interviews. The interviews and also results were structured

according to 8 perspectives: conceptual, process, technological, organisational, implementation, human

resources, economical, and administration. For each perspective, we examined the context of IM and KM

and analysed, described and interpreted the differences.

1 INTRODUCTION

Since Knowledge Management (KM) emergence in

mid-90s (Alavi and Leidner, 2001), knowledge-

based perspective of the firm has become one of the

most important research areas in the management

discipline. The systematic growth of KM research in

academia and KM initiatives in practice is opposed

by the disputes and disagreements on definitions of

KM and knowledge. Although KM can be viewed as

a “successor” of Information Management (IM)

because knowledge is hierarchically derived from

information, the border between these two

management approaches seems to be thin or even

translucent (more on KM in Section 2.1).

No unified or overall accepted definition of KM

exists (Dogan et al., 2011; Hlupic et al., 2002;

Rowley, 2007), moreover, some companies are not

able to distinguish KM from IM and ICT (Kruger

and Johnson, 2010) and researchers seem misusing

the terms knowledge and knowledge management

(Krčál and Rešlová, 2014), while the attempts

unifying this scatter situation are scarce (Dogan et

al., 2011) (more in Section 2.2). Therefore, the goal

of this paper is to put some order into the

understanding what KM and IM is, and what are the

differences between these two management

approaches. The presented research is based on

empirical data obtained from semi-structured

interviews (more on methodology in Section 3) and

identifies differences between practices of IM and

KM in seven companies (for results see Section 4).

2 LITERATURE REVIEW

The purpose of this literature review was to prepare

the structure for interviews. Therefore, studies

focused on the processes and the frameworks of KM

were reviewed in Section 2.1 and studies dealing

with differences between IM and KM were reviewed

in Section 2.2. The review on KM consisted mainly

from review articles and highly cited studies in the

field, the review on differences between IM and KM

was based on search queries in academic databases.

2.1 Knowledge Management

Defining KM is a challenging task as many

definitions exist (e.g. Dogan et al., 2011; Hlupic et

al., 2002; Rowley, 2007). Dogan et al. (2011)

tackled this problem by providing the most general

definition of KM: “to manage organisation’s

resources to get an advantage“. Clearly, KM in this

190

cál, M. and Kubiš, M.

Differences between Knowledge and Information Management Practices: Empirical Investigation.

DOI: 10.5220/0006053501900198

In Proceedings of the 8th International Joint Conference on Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (IC3K 2016) - Volume 3: KMIS, pages 190-198

ISBN: 978-989-758-203-5

context is based on the resource-based theory of the

firm introduced by Penrose (1995) in 1959. In this

sense, the ultimate resource of the company is

knowledge, which is part of a hierarchy that consists

from data, information, knowledge and wisdom.

Although the true origin of the hierarchy is arguable

(see Rowley, 2007) the interpretation of the

hierarchy seems to be varying only little or not at all.

Summarizing the Rowley’s (2007) list of definitions,

data can be understood as objective facts, or

observations without meaning, value or context.

Information differs from data by the context.

However, distinction between data and information

is based on the person that is receiving them

(Jashapara, 2004). Defining knowledge is also based

on the hierarchy however to summarize the different

definitions is more difficult. According to Rowley

(2007), knowledge is “a mix of information,

understanding, capability, experience, skills and

values”. Therefore, information cannot be separated

from knowledge, as IM cannot be separated from

KM (more in section 2.2).

Figure 1: Knowledge creating process according to

Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995).

Regarding the closeness of the knowledge to its

owner, Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995), following

Polanyi’s (1967) notion of tacit knowledge,

distinguished two types of knowledge: tacit and

explicit. Tacit knowledge is more abstract and it is

highly bound to the owner (Grant, 2007) and thus to

his background, experience, opinions and beliefs.

Explicit knowledge, on the other hand, is a

knowledge that can be freely separated from the

owner and act visibly as a part of the KM life-cycle

(Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995). It is being a

continuous dispute, whether it is possible to express

and transfer the tacit knowledge (Bouthillier and

Shearer, 2002; Fotache, 2013), thus adding more

confusion into the field of KM. The relationship

between tacit and explicit knowledge can be

explained by knowledge creation process presented

in Figure 1.

Another widely used understanding of KM is

defined as supporting a set of knowledge flows. KM

in this perspective is a way how organisations

identify, create, acquire, store, share, apply and

reuse knowledge (Probst, 1998). This framework

provides an overview of basic KM processes.

Jashapare (2004, p. 12) uses the basic KM processes

to describe the KM as follows: “the effective

learning processes associated with exploration,

exploitation and sharing of human knowledge (tacit

and explicit) that use appropriate technology and

cultural environment to enhance an organisation's

intellectual capital and performance”. We grounded

our research and the design of semi-structured

interviews on this definition.

One of the reasons of the difficulty to delimit the

field of KM and to define KM is probably the

discipline’s wideness (Bureš, 2007) as KM interferes

with large number of organisational functions.

Besides the KM process frameworks, KM can be

characterised and investigated by perspectives in

which KM exhibits its influence. Few studies

focused on KM with relation to IM utilized different

perspectives: Lopes and Morais (2010) analysed KM

from the perspectives of purpose, responsibility and

technology; Chen et al. (2005) used conceptual

(definitions), business goal, functional,

environmental (relations with other disciplines) and

Table 1: Perspectives of KM according to Liebowitz

(1999, pp. 1 – 20) and Bureš (2009).

Perspective Content

Conceptual Definition of knowledge and KM;

principles of KM. It contains the

general perception of KM

stakeholders which influences the

implementation of KM.

Process Definitions, content and

understanding of KM processes.

Technological The role of IS/ICT in helping and

supporting KM.

Organisational The nature of an organisational

structure (both formal and informal),

responsibilities and decision

making.

Implementation How KM is implemented in the

company with the focus on methods,

methodologies, critical success

factor, and strategic alignment.

Human

resources

How KM influences people in an

enterprise and organisation culture

and human resources management.

Economical How the enterprise evaluates

benefits and costs of KM.

Administrative How KM affects changes in

workflow and internal documents.

Differences between Knowledge and Information Management Practices: Empirical Investigation

191

organisational perspective. Probably the most

elaborate KM perspectives were developed by

Liebowitz (1999) and further expanded by Bureš

(2009). These perspectives (depicted in Table 1) will

be used as an extension of the Jashapara’s definition

in this article to inspect the possible differences

among IM and KM.

2.2 Comparison with Information

Management

Although recently, IM is regarded as an enabler for

KM (Kruger and Johnson, 2010), in the time of KM

emergence, an ongoing debate about KM being only

different label for IM (Bouthillier and Shearer,

2002) was held. Moreover, researchers were even

claiming that KM is nonsense, fad or fashion

(Wilson, 2002). Therefore, as was also briefly

discussed in previous section, border between IM

and KM is not clear and visible but rather blurred.

Recently, Kruger and Johnson (2010) reported that

(still) about 21% of the respondents in their survey

regarded ICT as KM and about 30% of them

regarded IM to be KM. Based on empirical data, the

15 years old debate seems not to be settled yet.

According to Kruger and Johnson (2010) confusion

could be explained by the nature of the cycle of

transferring data into information and information

into knowledge. However, according to Polanyi

(1967) and Grant (2007), the processes regarding

information and knowledge should not be treated the

same.

Nevertheless, scientometric data showed that

while the number of IM publications between years

1994 and 2004 remained almost the same, number of

publications raised from 7 publications during 1994

to 267 publications during 2002 (Gu, 2004). This

rocket increase cannot be attributed solely to a

research fashion or nonsense topic.

One of the few attempts to empirically

investigate the difference between IM and KM was

study by Lopes and Morais (2010) who investigated

four companies and analysed IM and KM with

respect to differences, reasons for implementing,

responsible person, existence of initiatives. They

concluded that investigated organisations distinguish

IM from KM however they are not every time

precise in that and IM seems to be more mature than

KM. Other studies such as (Bouthillier and Shearer,

2002; Fotache, 2013) concentrated on theoretical

comparison of IM and KM.

To summarize the differences identified in the

literature, distinction can be made in terms of main

goals, where IM aims to provide information

necessary for decision making, while KM focuses on

supporting knowledge flows in the organisation

(Bouthillier and Shearer, 2002; Lopes and Morais,

2010). From technological point of view, IM and

KM have their own supportive technologies (Lopes

and Morais, 2010). According to Terra and Angeloni

(2003), another differentiating factor can be the

security. In the case of IM security is understood as

a firewall and technological constrains securing the

intellectual ownership of the company however in

the case of KM, security is perceived as knowledge

retention through practices like mentoring and

through creating substitutability (Fotache, 2013;

Terra and Angeloni, 2003). Other fields in which IM

and KM differs can be the understanding of the

concepts by the organisation leadership (Lopes and

Morais, 2010), interplay between information and

knowledge, the scope of the projects (Terra and

Angeloni, 2003), or difference among organisational

learning and KM (Fotache, 2013; Terra and

Angeloni, 2003).

3 METHODOLOGY

The goal of this research was to identify the

differences between IM and KM. In order to

compare the disciplines, areas or criteria needed to

be identified. Therefore, we chose the perspectives

according to Liebowitz (1999) and Bureš (2007) (see

Section 2.1) as they seemed to be the most extensive

from the frameworks we reviewed.

For structuring the research design we chose the

concept of the “research onion” developed by

Saunders et al. (2015). However, this research was

part of a wider study, therefore some decision about

the research design were done in favour of other

parts of the research and not of this particular part

concerned with the differences between IM and KM.

The whole researched was focused on KM topics

that are underresearched therefore we employed

exploratory qualitative research. Although the

research strategy of the whole project followed

multiple case-study research strategy, this study

could be characterised more as exploratory study

based on expert interviews as no triangulation of

data was used. The sampling was purposive, in order

to achieve variability in the sample and thus trying

to identify similarities in varying conditions.

However, we focused mainly on IT and consultancy

sectors as they are likely to have advanced KM and

thus are worth to investigate. We investigated 7

different companies (for more details see Table 2)

and conducted 10 expert interviews in total (see

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Table 2: Characteristics of the companies in the sample.

Organisation

A B C D E F G

Sector Technology IT, technology Food industry

Industrial

components

Army

technologies

IT Logistics

Business type Service centre

Service centre,

Product

development

Trade Trade

Research and

development

Service centre,

Product

development

Logistics

Employees ČZ

(Global)

400 (2500) 3000 450 50 64 30 49 (1500)

Market scope EMEA (B2B) Global (B2B)

Regional

(B2B)

Global (B2B) Czech (B2B) Global (B2B) Global (B2B)

Table 3). We focused mainly on the respondents’

perception about their attitudes towards IM and KM

following the belief of Dogan et al. (2011, p. 396)

that organisations should develop their own

definition of knowledge and information to be able

to management them. And we wanted to investigate,

how the own definition and perception of

information and knowledge and IM and KM looks

like in reality.

For designing the interviews, we deductively

identified the necessary theoretical framework which

resulted in a basic structure consisted from eight

perspectives (see Section 2.1 and Table 1). The final

interview structure concentrated on questions

regarding following areas:

 organisational structure of IM and KM;

 interpretation of KM;

 difference between interpretation of IM and

KM;

 goals of IM and KM;

 overview of key knowledge;

 activities and initiatives in IM and KM;

 information systems supporting for IM and

KM;

 drivers for KM;

 barriers for KM implementation;

 form of feedback in IM and KM;

 measurement of IM and KM.

The transcripts (where available) of the inter-

views were coded into the main categories and then

subcategories according to perspectives described in

Table 1. The coded segments were then studied and

contextualized with the literature review to emerge a

simple framework encompassing differences among

IM and KM in multiple business areas. To

accomplish this goal, the coded data were

interpreted according to the KM perspectives

framework (see Section 2.1 and Table 1). This

framework was chosen as to be the best fitting by

including the majority of IM/KM areas of difference

captured in the researches on the same topic

identifies in the literature review.

4 RESULTS

We divided this section into several subsections

according to each perspective we examined. For

each perspective, we summarized the content of the

interviews regarding the IM part of the perspective

and KM part of the perspective and identified the

differences between IM and KM.

4.1 Conceptual Perspective

In Table 4, summarized definitions of IM and KM

provided by respondents and the perception of the

terms information and knowledge are described.

Conceptual perspective was based on following

segments of structure: KM interpretation and

difference between IM and KM interpretation and

conceptual difference between IM and KM in

frameworks of Fotache, (2013) and Lopes and

Morais (2010). Two concepts of IM definition were

identified among the interviewees. Firstly, it was

aimed at the information systems management. This

view contained choosing an appropriate system

solution how to work with information. Secondly,

respondents saw IM as obtaining and allocating of

information to support business decisions.

Understanding of KM was mostly defined as

managerial activity supporting some of the

knowledge processes. Mentioned processes differed

by the interviewee, but all were based on the

lifecycle of knowledge presented by Probst (1998).

Second supplementary explanation can be summed

as awareness of what the organisation knows and

making such knowledge available where needed in

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Table 3: Characteristics of the respondents and the interviews. G stands for enough time, M stands for limited time and B

stands for not enough time for interview.

Organisation Interviewee Position Length Taped Environment Notes

R1 Knowledge engineer 80 Yes Meeting room G; morning; use of blackboard

R2 IT manager 25 No Meeting room B; morning

Learning and

development manager

40 No Meeting room

G; after lunch; after Q1

deadline

R4 HR senior 30 Yes Leisure zone M; after lunch

R5 HR director 70 Yes Meeting room G; after lunch

R6 1st level manager 30 Yes Café G; afternoon; no disturbance

D R7 Commercial manager 40 Yes University G; afternoon; no disturbance

E R8 Executive director 30 Yes Home

M; afternoon; presence of

interviewee´s daughter

F R9 Executive board 45 Yes Home G; morning

G R10 HR Director 45 Yes Office G; afternoon; no disturbance

the required time towards better business efficiency.

Other less mentioned differences were IM as an

evolution step towards KM and usage of IMS and

KMS.

Table 4: Difference between IM and KM and information

and knowledge according to the conceptual perspective.

Definitions

Management activity aimed at identifying the

necessary information for decision making in

the organisation and the selection and

management of appropriate tools for storing,

sharing, and security of the information.

Continuous management activity aimed at the

facilitation and management of knowledge

flows in order to increase business efficiency.

Diff

IM focus is on system utilization, KM focuses

on system utilization and utilization human

capital. Unlike IM, KM features a continuous

endless process.

DIKW hierarchy

Information is data with associated meanings,

with given order, and utilisable for decision

making.

An important part of human capital, once used

properly it enables the company to gain a

competitive advantage and culture focused on

innovation.

Diff

Knowledge is unlike information complemented

by context (explicit knowledge), or the

processing of the human mind (tacit

knowledge). The implication is an effort to

eliminate losses in work with knowledge, what

is not necessary in IM.

Compared with difference between IM and KM,

the difference between information and knowledge

presented by interviewees was more consistent.

Information was broadly interpreted as a data with

given meaning prepared for action and knowledge as

a part of human capital which makes it valuable for

the organisation. Knowledge is perceived as a main

diver of innovation and growing part of an

organisation competitive advantage.

4.2 Process Perspective

Process perspective shows what processes are used

to support both information and knowledge flows.

This perspective can be also used as an explanation

for the difference in IM and KM projects (Fotache,

2013; Terra and Angeloni, 2003). According to the

data both IM and KM use types of processes

mentioned in the KM lifecycle. The difference is in

the focus on other processes and the scope of

processes. IM is focusing on storing and sharing,

KM is focusing on much broader list of processes,

mainly on storing, sharing and reuse. Additionally,

IM is focusing on analysing working with

information. More details can be found in Table 5.

Table 5: Difference between processes of IM and KM.

Processes

Storing, analysing, sharing, joint work with

information.

Identification, development, acquisition,

storage, sharing and reuse of knowledge.

Diff

KM displays a never-ending cycle of

knowledge flows. IM processes in enterprises

are far more scattered.

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4.3 Technological Perspective

The technological perspective explains the

difference between system support of IM and KM

by difference between IMS and KMS as used in

(Lopes and Morais, 2010). According to the data IM

is broadly perceived as a management of the

organisations of IS/ICT. Alternative explanation of

IMS was the systems which allow and support the

IM processes. KMS could be split into systems

supporting explicit and tacit knowledge. The former

mostly support the dissemination of knowledge as

the latter predominantly support socialisation and

processes of knowledge creation and sharing. In

Table 6, IMS and KMS examples are as described

by interviewees.

Technological perspective can be understood

also from the point of intellectual capital security.

From this point of view, IS/ICT security is a part of

the IM initiative as opposed to securing a human

capital in the organisation, which is part of KM from

the view of human resources perspective.

Table 6: IS/ICT supporting IM and KM and security.

IS/ICT

Systems that support the flow of data and

information: DMS, intranet, BI tools, ERP.

Systems that support knowledge flows. Require

human involvement in the operational phase and

context: LMS, Helpdesk systems, knowledge

bases, collaborative systems, groupware, and

bulletin board systems.

Diff

The difference is in the content and emphasis on

the context. IMS most important feature is to

allow access to all needs. KMS most important

feature is managed content and ensuring its

quality.

Security

Security of data and information through the

firewall and protective elements.

Investigated companies do not engage in any

security measures regarding KM.

Diff

ICT security is perceived as a part of IM from

technological perspective

4.4 Organisational Perspective

For the organisational perspective the data were

gathered from answers to questions focusing on

activities of IM and KM and on KM and IM

organisational structure (see Table 7).

Organisational structure roles were also studied in

the Lopes and Morais (2010) framework. Practices

are part of this perspective as they are basis for

creating informal structures in the organisations to

support IM and KM processes. Roles and

responsibilities in the context of IM and KM were

merged into groups applicable in IM and KM of the

researched organisations. The existence of roles such

as Chief Knowledge Officers (CKOs) and Chief

Information Officers (CIOs) positions were not

identified in the studied sample.

Table 7: Roles and practices involved in IM and KM.

Roles

Decision makers: Senior management, CIOs

IM specialist: IT department.

IM agents: All employees working with ICT.

Decision making: Senior management

KM specialist: Knowledge Engineer,

Department for learning and development

KM Agents: Knowledge workers who

contribute to the knowledge flows

Domain experts: Knowledge agents holding key

organisational knowledge.

Diff

Activities of KM are more targeted. For the

most of the tools and activities the

understanding who will benefit from KM

activities is known or understood.

Practices

Developing and management of a document

management solution; management and

technological support for ICT; Business

Intelligence and data driven decision making

Communities of practice, job rotation,

mentoring, couching, operational workshops.

Diff

KM develops informal organisational structures

targeted to support knowledge flows.

4.5 Implementation Perspective

From implementation perspective, the organisations

were studied according to the drivers leading to IM

and KM initiatives and the methodologies employed

in the process of implementation. The implementa-

tion of IM was understood mainly as the

implementation of IS/ICT to enable business to

decide better due to more and better information.

Interviewees stressed many barriers, however, the

difficulty of measurement and inability to track the

long term effects.

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195

Table 8: Differences in implementation of IM and KM.

Implementation

Implementation of IM is based on the

importance of information for decision making

and need of ICT

KM implementation is based on the awareness

of senior management on the need to work with

knowledge.

Diff

IM is in some form present in every

organisation, KM is often not implemented in

full scope, and encounters a lot of complications

4.6 Human Resources Perspective

The interviewees did not perceive human resources

(HR) related in any way with IM. Regarding KM,

human resources activities consist from managerial

activity aimed at motivation and stimulation of the

knowledge workers and domain experts to support

some of the KM processes. As mentioned above (see

Section 4.3.), HR management, specifically talent

management and domain experts retention are

perceived as the intellectual capital security (KM

security) and are part of a KM initiatives.

Table 9: The role of human resources in KM and IM.

Human resources

Investigated companies do not engage in any

human resources measures regarding IM.

Staff development, creation of substitutability of

domain experts.

The system for stimulation and motivation of

knowledge agents to support knowledge flows.

Diff

Human Resources perspective is not recognized

for IM

4.7 Economical Perspective

The content of the economical perspective are the

desired effects of IM and KM and how the

companies measure these effects. The data for this

perspective were gathered from questions related

with IM and KM drivers, IM and KM feedback, and

IM and KM measurement. Table X synthetizes the

difference in the economic perspective of IM and

KM practices. The respondents understood the

importance of the use of qualitative measures for

KM. Quantitative measurement of KM initiatives

resulted unfavourable results of KM initiatives and

therefore acted as a barrier for the implementation.

Table 10: Approaches to evaluation of IM and KM and

benefits that are generated by both disciplines.

Evaluation

Quantitative Metrics: ROI, the amount of

content.

Qualitative metrics: Employee turnover,

employee satisfaction, quality content.

Diff

Quantitative vs. Quality metric.

Application of quantitative metrics on KM is

common and major obstacle.

Benefits

The use of information for management

decisions, risk management.

Innovation, organisational excellence, customer

approach, growth and change.

Diff

IM to improve decision-making, KM to improve

outcomes of the company.

4.8 Administrative Perspective

Last area of difference between IM and KM in this

research is the way of improving administrative

efficiency. Interviewees agreed on a perception of

IM supporting the administrative efficiency by

choosing the best IS/ICT solution and managing it.

The KM administrative involvement is based on

process improvement and innovation.

Table 11: The way how IM and KM is administrated.

Administration

Choosing best document management solutions.

Setting rules for working with ICT.

Process innovation and organisational

excellence.

Diff

Setting up and implementing administrative

processes (IM) compared to their improvement

(ZM)

5 DISCUSSION

Comparison of Knowledge Management (IM) to

Information Management (IM) is (partially to our

surprise) not very frequent research topic, even if

omitting or ignoring the differences can potentially

result into the failure of KM initiative or not

implementing KM at all. In investigated companies

IM and KM differ on conceptual level in several

ways. Firstly, KM is perceived as something that can

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provide the company the competitive advantage,

whereas IM is perceived as something almost

mandatory which is needed for decision-making.

Secondly, the respondents were reporting difference

concerning the repeatability as IM was perceived as

one-time endeavour that has automated nature,

whereas KM was perceived as ongoing or never-

ending cycle that needs ongoing attention. This

clearly refers to the difference of the role of people

in IM and KM.

Similarly, investigation of the process

perspective revealed that IM consisted from multiple

unrelated processes that were jointly serving for

better decision making. On the contrary, KM

processes were viewed by the respondents as the

part of the continuous cycle. Moreover, interviewees

leaned towards an understanding of a never-ending

lifecycle producing continuous improvement in

terms of KM benefits discussed in the context of the

economic perspective in next paragraph.

Regarding the economical perspective, we have

showed that the respondents’ overall notion about

KM is that it can foster innovation, organisational

excellence or change, and growth of the company.

This is not very novel result however the difference

between IM and KM in this matter can be

interpreted in a way that IM supports tactical level of

management (decision making, risk management)

while KM directly supports company on the

strategic level. More interestingly, we discovered

that the inability of companies (and theory as well)

to truly measure intangible benefits of KM can

affect both the success of KM initiatives and the

decision about implementing KM. Therefore for

further research, we suggest focusing on methods

and approaches that would be able to evaluate

intangible benefits more properly.

From the organizational perspective, the

difference is mainly in the existence of informal

structures in connection with KM. Both IM and KM

need support from formal structures which can be

described as positions in the structure which receive

partial or full responsibility for supporting IM or

KM processes. Interestingly, no company formalized

IM or KM by o CIO or CKO. The existence of

informal structures, purposefully created (e.g.

workshops for knowledge sharing) or spontaneously

emerged (e.g. community of practice), is distinct for

KM, even if the informal structures need to be

interlinked with or initiated by formal structures.

Distinct differences can be identified in the

technological perspective. For supporting KM,

companies are using entirely different types of

software. KM information support differs from IM

information support mainly in the focus on

technologies that are connecting people (e.g.

enterprise social software).

Finally, according to the data gathered from

respondents, and to the discussion of some

interesting outcomes, KM can be characterised with

regard to distinction to IM as follows:

 KM intervenes with strategic level of

management in contrast with IM mainly

dealing with tactical level of management;

 KM is perceived as endless cycle, while IM is

usually perceived as one time endeavour;

 KM is dependent and focused on people,

while IM is concerned more with technology

and standardization;

 KM is difficult to measure.

This study, being exploratory and qualitative, has

of course some limitation. Firstly, it is based on the

sample of 7 companies and 10 respondents in total

therefore any generalization is problematic or

impossible. However, the results were able to

provide directions for further research (see below).

Secondly, more elaborate literature review could

reveal better or more detailed perspective framework

which would bring more details in the investigation

of differences. Thirdly, some results and outcomes

of this study are particularly not very novel.

However, we were able to induce these results in

concrete context therefore they at least enhance the

reliability and understanding of previous studies.

And finally, we measured respondents’ attitudes and

perceptions, which cannot be considered as objective

however, our initial intention was to investigate the

opinions of companies on the difference of IM and

KM.

Further research could therefore focus on several

issues. Firstly, it could enhance the studied sample

or investigate the perceived differences in other

settings than this study. Secondly, either finer

framework could be found and used, or more

categories or perspectives for assessing the

differences between IM and KM could be revealed.

6 CONCLUSION

The goal of this study was to investigate what are

the differences between IM and KM in the chosen

sample of enterprises. We addressed this goal by

exploratory qualitative inductive research design

based on expert interviews. In order to design the

study, we looked for a convenient framework that

would guide as and structure at least a little bit the

Differences between Knowledge and Information Management Practices: Empirical Investigation

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complex and sometimes captious reality of

Knowledge Management. We used the framework

based on the studies by Liebowitz (1999) and by

Bureš (2009). The results of our study show that

contrary to the early opinions (presented e.g. by

Wilson (2002)) that Knowledge Management is

“rebranded” Information Management, we found

some clear differences between IM and KM that

could help researchers and practitioners with better

understanding of their IM and KM initiatives.

Without distinguishing IM from KM, success of KM

initiatives and validity of KM research is limited.

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