Differences between knowledge and information management
practices: empirical investigation
Michal Krčál1
, Michal Kubiš1
1
Faculty of Economics and Administration,Department of Corporate Economics, Masaryk University, Lipová 41a, Brno,
Czech Republic
{369849, michal.krcal}@mail.muni.cz
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), knowledgebased
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
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
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.
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.
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
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
interviews 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
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)
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
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.
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.
Table 4: Difference between IM and KM and information
and knowledge according to the conceptual perspective.
Definitions
IM
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.
KM
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
IM
Information is data with associated meanings,
with given order, and utilisable for decision
making.
KM
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.
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
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
A
R1 Knowledge engineer 80 Yes Meeting room
G; morning; use of
blackboard
R2 IT manager 25 No Meeting room B; morning
B
R3
Learning and
development manager
40 No Meeting room
G; after lunch; after Q1
deadline
R4 HR senior 30 Yes Leisure zone M; after lunch
C
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
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
IM
Storing, analysing, sharing, joint work with
information.
KM
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.
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
IM
Systems that support the flow of data and
information: DMS, intranet, BI tools, ERP.
KM
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
IM
Security of data and information through the
firewall and protective elements.
KM
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
IM
Decision makers: Senior management, CIOs
IM specialist: IT department.
IM agents: All employees working with ICT.
KM
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
IM
Developing and management of a document
management solution; management and
technological support for ICT; Business
Intelligence and data driven decision making
KM
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
implementation 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.
Table 8: Differences in implementation of IM and KM.
Implementation
IM
Implementation of IM is based on the
importance of information for decision making
and need of ICT
KM
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
IM
Investigated companies do not engage in any
human resources measures regarding IM.
KM
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
IM
Quantitative Metrics: ROI, the amount of
content.
KM
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
IM
The use of information for management
decisions, risk management.
KM
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
IM
Choosing best document management solutions.
Setting rules for working with ICT.
KM
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
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 neverending
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
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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