DocOps (Documentation Operations) is applying the same treatment to knowledge management that DevOps did for old fashion IT operations.
Documentation versus Knowledge
Documentation is not the same as knowledge. Knowledge is “strictly a phenomenon of the human mind, whereas data and information are often represented by tangible, physical objects.” (Case and Given, 2016)
The Dead of Knowledge Management Systems
Take the term Knowledge Management System (KMS). A KMS is a system in which documentation is stored and maintained. This term presumes that the system itself is the one which has acquired the knowledge, rather than the humans. This confounds, in the eyes of upper management, the acquisition of an IT product with the solving of knowledge gap issues. To avoid this ambiguity, Choo (2002) differentiates between explicit knowledge—the one codified in documents—versus tacit knowledge—the one gained by humans through living experience.
The Myth of Knowledge Transfer
Another baffling term Knowledge Transfer (KT). This term is loved by system integrators who use this word to describe the step in which their members of staff ‘acquire’ the knowledge from employees—or their competitors—before taking over their jobs. By employing the term in this way, KT presumes that (1) information is stored in peoples’ heads as though their brains were a disk drive, and that (2) knowledge is easily transferred from one person’s head to another’s by simply sitting with them for some time or running a few video conference calls.
Documentation, and in particular DocOps, is humbler in this respect. The DocOps view is that only information—rather than knowledge—-can be effectively externalized. Moreover, at a most fundamental level, knowledge is what workers in an enterprise accumulate through years of professional experience, and what confers them their differentiating value—tacit knowledge in Choo’s model.
DocOps View on Knowledge Management
This isn’t a philosophical detail; the key difference between DocOps and the traditional take on knowledge management is that we can’t control knowledge; only the storage, transmission, and processing of information. What I will use repeatedly, though, is the compound term knowledge gap, which refers to what contemporary documentation systems and DocOps aim to solve. In other words, an effective documentation system aims to fill knowledge gaps as opposed to ‘storing knowledge’.
Conclusion
DocOps treats documentation systems as a tool for rapid querying and look-up, with the ultimate purpose of unlocking the flow of work, in a pointed, contextual fashion. This is unlike the notion of storing bast swabs of enterprise ‘knowledge’ for the purpose of ‘uploading’ it into human brains, similarly to how Neo learned Jiu Jitsu in the movie The Matrix.
References
Case, D. O., & Given, L. M. (2016). Looking for Information: A Survey of Research on Information Seeking, Needs, and Behavior. (pp. 73,254). Emerald Group Publishing Limited.
Kindle Edition
Choo, C. W. (2002). Information Management for the intelligent Organization: The Art of Scanning the Environment. Information Today, Inc. (pp. 22,23,57, 80, 101, 292, 247, 248)
