TABLE OF CONTENTS Quick, what s the definition of knowledge management? Don t know? Join the crowd. Welcome to the most successful fuzzy idea in the history of management. KM has been successful in the sense that everybody seems to be doing it, and fuzzy in the sense that nobody seems to agree on what it is. Definitions of knowledge management generally range from data warehousing or data mining on the one hand, to vague notions of communities of practice as comprising the salvation of business and humankind, on the other. Would the real knowledge management please stand up!
Despite all the confusion in the marketplace, there apparently has been some agreement for many on one common theme: knowledge management is all about getting the right information to the right people at the right time. Practicing knowledge management has therefore been mostly about information capture, indexing, storage, and retrieval which means that it should come as no surprise to anyone that the conventional practice of KM has been utterly technocentric. If KM is all about delivering information to people on a timely basis, what better way to do so than to arm them with technology and the data du jour of their choosing? Have it your way, as it were.
These delivery-oriented approaches to knowledge management amount to what I like to think of as supply-side KM schemes. [3] The practice of supply-side KM begins with the assumption that valuable organizational knowledge exists, and that the primary task of the...
