I just came across an interesting piece over at Inside Knowledge that argues that possessing competence is actually more important than the “mere acquisition, development, storage, usage, ownership and protection of concepts and facts”. Competence, in this argument, extends beyond just knowing something — it’s more about the practical and useful application of knowledge.

The authors go on to describe a ‘framework of competence’, through which competence can be managed. It’s the authors opinion that competence matters a great deal more than just knowledge, and that by extension, the management of competence is of greater value to an organization than the management of knowledge.

Yet it would seem to me that there is an assumption inherent to the phrase ‘knowledge management’ (rightly or wrongly) that assumes that knowledge is, in fact, applied information. Not that I want to open the (very tired) data-information-knowledge(-wisdom?) can of worms. The interesting part about the word ‘competence’ to me however, is that it denotes something entirely different than what is denoted by the data-information-knowledge hierarchy, and I don’t think ‘competence’ really fits in there hierarchically. Either way, definitely an interesting read.