There are two meanings for information flow. The second one refers to a particular formalisation of the flow of information by John Barwise and Jerry Seligman. In computers, it can be a real process of computing directly the instructions of a programming language in order to provide the result. The term knowledge is not easy to specify. So indirectly knowledge is tied to action.
Competence is then the capacity to take advantage of knowledge in actions.
But, the goal of these works being to carry and interpret knowledge, the discipline is not badly named. It is decomposed into atomic knowledge flow from one knowledge repository to another. The reverse does not generally hold. It must be a long term, non driven by computer, social or organisational aspects alone. This is what the Exmo project is about.