The term Knowledge Management System is often used to describe how organizations handle knowledge, information, and learning. The problem is not the idea of a system itself, but how the language is usually heard and acted on. A clearer approach distinguishes technical platforms from the wider socio-technical practices through which knowledge actually develops.
Knowledge Management as an Oxymoron
The term Knowledge Management has always been problematic. Strictly speaking, it is an oxymoron. Knowledge is not something we can manage in the way we manage budgets, projects, or inventories. Knowledge lives in people, in practice, in context, and in action. It is something people do. We can support it, influence it, and create conditions for it to emerge, but we cannot manage it directly.
That said, the term is not going away. It was coined early, it stuck, and it has become institutionalized. There are now tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of people with the job title Knowledge Manager. Challenging the label at this point is largely futile. More importantly, it risks missing the deeper issue of how the language shapes expectations and behaviour.
What Is Actually Being Managed
Most people working under the banner of Knowledge Management are not managing knowledge in any literal sense. They are managing information. They look after platforms like SharePoint. They design taxonomies, manage documents, improve search, maintain repositories, and support access to content. This is valuable and necessary work. It just operates at a different level.
Information systems manage content. They store, organize, retrieve, and distribute material. They also influence how we work by shaping attention, incentives, and habits. But none of this guarantees understanding, learning, or wise action. Those still depend on how we interpret, discuss, and use what they encounter.
So, a pragmatic stance is to accept the term Knowledge Management, while being clearer about what it refers to in practice. Acknowledge the oxymoron. Be explicit that information is what can be managed, while knowledge emerges through use, interpretation, and judgment. That distinction alone removes much confusion.
The Problem with Knowledge Management Systems
The difficulties intensify with the term Knowledge Management System.
A system does not have to be purely technical. It can also refer to a socio-technical arrangement, a set of interrelated practices, roles, and tools. In theory, this broader meaning could accommodate how knowledge actually works. In practice, however, the term is almost always understood to refer to a technical platform.
When people describe SharePoint as a Knowledge Management System, they are rarely being careless. They are following the logic of the language they have inherited. SharePoint is clearly a system. It manages things. If knowledge is assumed to be a thing, then the conclusion follows. But what SharePoint manages are documents, files, and metadata. In other words, information.
The phrase Knowledge Management System therefore reinforces several assumptions at once. That knowledge behaves like an object. That it can be deliberately managed. And that technology is the primary means for doing so. Even when people intend a broader meaning, the language consistently pulls practice back toward technical solutions.
This has consequences. Responsibility for knowledge is subtly relocated from people and collective practice to platforms and processes. Learning and judgment are framed as outcomes of capture, compliance, and access rather than of conversation, experience, and reflection.
From Systems to Ecosystems
If there is a system worth paying attention to here, it is not a bounded technical one. It is the whole socio-technical environment in which people work and interact. That includes information systems, conversations, relationships, trust, incentives, habits, leadership behaviours, and opportunities for reflection and learning.
Most of what we value as knowledge emerges in interaction. In conversations where ideas are tested and assumptions challenged. In shared work, problems are encountered and resolved together. In stories that carry experience across contexts. These patterns cannot be designed or rolled out as systems usually are, but they can be influenced and supported over time.
Seen this way, it is more accurate to talk about a knowledge ecosystem rather than a system.
Calling Things What They Are
Knowledge Management may be an oxymoron we have learned to live with. Knowledge Management Systems are more problematic, not because systems are unhelpful, but because the language repeatedly narrows attention to technology.
When we are referring to platforms that store, organize, and retrieve documents and data, we should call them what they are: Information Management systems. When we are talking about how knowledge develops through people working together, we should avoid system language altogether.
Clearer distinctions do not weaken KM. They place responsibility back where it belongs and make it easier to invest in the social and relational practices through which understanding and wise action actually emerge.
We can start by being more careful with the language we use. When we name systems accurately, we set better expectations for what they can and cannot do. That clarity helps us focus more attention on the human practices that shape learning, judgment, and action in everyday work.
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