Knowledge Management
The speeding up of all elements of global trade—mainly because of information technology—and the decline of centralized economies have created an almost frenetic atmosphere within firms, which feel compelled to bring new products and services to wider markets ever more quickly. This combination of global reach and speed compels organizations to ask themselves, “What do we know, who knows it, what do we not know that we should know?”
[KMHistory, p.1002]
An unintended consequence of ubiquitous and transparent computing is the premium value of knowledge that cannot be digitized, codified, or easily distributed.
[KMHistory, p.1002]
If organizations can manage the learning process better—the most effective ways to pass on the often tacit understandings that form the basis of how they operate—then clearly they can become more efficient. Developing these learning strategies has subsequently become an important knowledge management theme.
[KMHistory, p.1004]
Another essential question in economics—“What is the unit of analysis and how do we measure it?”—has become an essential knowledge management question. We are making clear progress on this issue, looking more and more at groups and networks as the focal points of organizational knowledge.
[KMHistory, p.1004]
At the micro level, sociology’s strong research interest in the complex structures of internal networks and communities has obvious relevance to knowledge management. As I have suggested, most practitioners today would probably agree that knowledge exists and grows mainly in these structures, and they have begun to study networks and communities as the most productive units of analysis for doing knowledge work.
[KMHistory, p.1004]
Almost from the beginning, knowledge management has explored the differences between tacit and explicit knowledge, between “know how” and “know what.”
[KMHistory, p.1005]
Psychology too is concerned about different kinds of knowing as well as about how and why people learn, forget, ignore, act, or fail to act. It looks at natural cognitive processes and raises questions of will and motivation that make it impossible to think of knowledge in terms of mechanical transfer from donors to recipients.
[KMHistory, p.1005]
Knowledge is a fluid mix of framed experience, values, contextual information, and expert insight that provides a framework for evaluating and incorporating new experiences and information. It originates and is applied in the minds of ‘knowers’. In organizations, it often becomes embedded not only in documents or repositories but also in organizational routines, processes, practices, and norms.
[KMFoundations, p.84]
Information consists of ‘facts and data that are organized to describe a particular situation or condition’. Knowledge is distinguished from information by the addition of ‘truths, beliefs, perspectives and concepts, judgments and expectations, methodologies, and know-how’.
[KMFoundations, p.84]
As the practice of knowledge management developed through the first years of the new millennium, the distinction between knowledge and information grew vague. Undeterred by accusations of ‘search and replace marketing’, many aspects of IS and information technology have been variously mislabeled as knowledge management (Wilson, 2002).
[KMFoundations, p.84]
These hazy distinctions can create boundary problems beyond the concept of knowledge itself, clouding the distinction between knowledge management research and the other fields of research that underlie it. For practical reasons, we must ultimately rely on the words of the researchers themselves, and trust them to label ‘knowledge management’ as such, thus giving us a reasonably clear boundary line by which to distinguish knowledge management from other intellectual fields that may be distinct from, but related to it.
[KMFoundations, p.84]
Tacit knowledge is non-verbalized, intuitive, and unarticulated, in contrast to articulated knowledge expressed in some written or spoken form.
[KMFoundations, p.90]
Either tacit or articulated forms of knowledge can be a property of an individual, group, organization, or an inter-organizational domain.
[KMFoundations, p.90]
The implications of the presence of theoretical cohesion and overarching theories are of particular interest to a field that is associated with a management buzzword. This presence indicates a field that is developing an independent body of theory with good groundwork and internal consistency. The evidence suggests that knowledge management is now a solid, maturing field of study that is building out, not only from external theory bases but also by expanding on the basis of its own theories. The field of knowledge management is clearly not a fad as suggested by Wilson (2002).
[KMFoundations, p.101]
