If you have knowledge workers then they must make and ship knowledge (or so the manufacturing analogy goes). So they need parts to do that - which they get from the stores (after all, there are plenty of data warehouses) to assemble into product. And these parts need to be stored somewhere.
The part of this metaphor that is often forgotten is that inventory depreciates over time. The goal of many organisations is to carry as little physical inventory as possible. The lifecycle for documented experience is rarely considered. We talk about knowledge assets - over what period of time do you depreciate a knowledge asset?
(Now several folk have promoted Just In Time KM in various forms - incl. Tom Davenport & Dave Snowden. One question I would put to them is: JIT supply chains are efficient (& effective) but fragile - if the flow of materials & information in them is broken then there is no inventory to pad this out. Are such JIT KM approaches similarly fragile?)
In manufacturing your parts belong to a bill of materials that make up specific products. Documented experience rarely fits together like this. Without this bill of materials it is difficult to see how individual artifacts relate to each other.
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Have you ever worked in warehouse Denham? Most warehouses are all about "flow".
N.B. All these metaphors are incomplete and partial. I was simply trying to explore 3 of the most common I have heard in the course of work.
And yes, all three of them lean towards "knowledge as thing" rather than "knowledge as flow" - because those are the metaphors that people use with databases.
Part of this exercise was indicating that.
There are plenty of other metaphors to draw upon: the dinner party, the bazaar, even street gangs & church congregations...
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