TABLE OF CONTENTS Learning is not compulsory ... neither is survival.
W. Edward Deming
What drives modern organizations to explore knowledge management (KM)? What exactly do we mean by the term? There have been some fairly unflattering answers to this question. It has been accused of being just a management fad, like the early 1990s enthusiasm for Quality Management or the hype around Business Process Re-engineering (BPR), which after their fairly brief moment in the spotlight, stood accused of being little more than the repackaging of a few genuine good ideas and practices, wrapped in a rich and largely unnecessary consultancy mystique (interestingly, both have since become part of the general business toolset, though the promises and project scope have become more moderate and realistic).
Others, meanwhile, have argued knowledge management is a new name for something else - information management, or document management. Still others see in knowledge management a revival of the 1980s enthusiasm for 'expert systems' created around a 'knowledge base' - a technology that at the time failed to achieve its potential, now reborn with the same promises of cost saving and easy access to expertise, but with the benefit of enhanced performance due to the rise of internet- related technologies.
There is some truth in all of the above, but the whole story is of a much richer picture. Clearly, we, the authors, wouldn't have written this book if we didn't believe that knowledge management as a...
