Knowledge management (KM) is a field that can easily be described as having two sides to it: one that tends to focus on knowledge sharing, and the other that tends to focus on knowledge making. It is the latter side that accounts for the connections between KM and innovation management (IM), and the former one which accounts for the ties between KM and organizational learning (OL).

In truth, however, it is the former group (the knowledge sharers) who tend to get the most attention in the marketplace. The value proposition of KM, according to their view, is that it helps make old learning more accessible and reusable for current-day workers, thereby improving their performance. To get a better feel for the logic here, listen to the following statement made by a well-known management guru as he discussed one of four types of interventions that he felt managers should make to improve the performance of their workers:

The first of these four groups of duties taken over by the management is the deliberate gathering on the part of those on the management s side of all of the great mass of traditional knowledge, which in the past has been in the heads of the workmen, and in the physical skill and knack of the workmen, which he has acquired through years of experience. The duty of gathering all this great mass of traditional knowledge and then recording it, tabulating it, and, in many cases, finally reducing it to laws,...