Starting Points

Knowledge management (KM) has attracted considerable attention in recent years. Nonetheless, there are few widely shared views according to which the term itself is defined, much less a consensus on how best to apply it in business. Nevertheless, advances have been made in recent years to help define the field. One such effort has been that of a nonprofit professional association of KM practitioners, known as the Knowledge Management Consortium International, or KMCI.

Beginning in 1997, KMCI undertook the task of developing industry-standard reference models for KM that practitioners around the world could use as a basis for making valuable interventions in their own organizations. Central to KMCI s thinking was and still is two important distinctions. First is the presence of two distinctly different operating modes in every organization: the knowledge processing environment (KPE) and the business processing environment (BPE). Second is the related distinction between knowledge processing and knowledge management. Understanding the meaning of these important distinctions is crucial to appreciating the role that KM can play in business, as well as in avoiding confusion around what KM really is and isn t. Let s explore these ideas further.

First, according to the KM standard developed by KMCI, knowledge processing is a social process found in every organization to one degree or another, although the quality and effectiveness of knowledge production and integration (the two components of knowledge processing) can vary widely from one company to another. This cycle