KM emerged as a scientific discipline in the early 1990s. It was initially supported by individual practitioners, when
Skandia hired Leif Edvinsson of Sweden as the world's first
chief knowledge officer (CKO). Hubert Saint-Onge (formerly of
CIBC, Canada), started investigating KM long before that. The KM idea has been taken up by academics, such as
Ikujiro Nonaka (
Hitotsubashi University), Hirotaka Takeuchi (Hitotsubashi University),
Thomas H. Davenport (
Babson College) and Baruch Lev (
New York University). In 2001,
Thomas A. Stewart, former editor at
Fortune magazine and subsequently the editor of
Harvard Business Review, published a cover story highlighting the importance of intellectual capital in organizations. The KM discipline has been gradually moving towards academic maturity. Third, the number of academic knowledge management journals has been steadily growing, currently reaching 27 outlets. Multiple KM disciplines exist; approaches vary by author and school. As the discipline matured, academic debates increased regarding
theory and practice, including: • Techno-centric with a focus on technology, ideally those that enhance
knowledge sharing and creation. • Organisational with a focus on how an organisation can be designed to facilitate knowledge processes best. • Social-psychological, with a focus on how social networks contribute to a transactive memory system •
Ecological with a focus on the interaction of people,
identity, knowledge, and environmental factors as a
complex adaptive system akin to a natural
ecosystem. Regardless of the
school of thought, core components of KM roughly include people/culture, processes/structure and technology. The details depend on the
perspective. KM perspectives include: •
community of practice •
social network analysis •
intellectual capital • constructivism The practical relevance of academic research in KM has been questioned with
action research suggested as having more relevance and the need to translate the findings presented in academic journals to a practice. In this model, knowledge follows a cycle in which implicit knowledge is 'extracted' to become explicit knowledge, and explicit knowledge is 're-internalised' into implicit knowledge. The content perspective suggests that knowledge is easily stored; because it may be codified, while the relational perspective recognises the contextual and relational aspects of knowledge which can make knowledge difficult to share outside the specific context in which it is developed. Subsequent research suggested that a distinction between tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge represented an oversimplification and that the notion of explicit knowledge is self-contradictory. More recently, together with
Georg von Krogh and
Sven Voelpel, Nonaka returned to his earlier work in an attempt to move the debate about knowledge conversion forward. A second proposed framework for categorising knowledge dimensions distinguishes embedded knowledge of a
system outside a human individual (e.g., an information system may have knowledge embedded into its design) from
embodied knowledge representing a learned capability of a human body's
nervous and
endocrine systems. A third proposed framework distinguishes between the exploratory creation of "new knowledge" (i.e., innovation) vs. the
transfer or exploitation of "established knowledge" within a group, organisation, or community. Collaborative environments such as communities of practice or the use of
social computing tools can be used for both knowledge creation and transfer. Organisations have tried knowledge capture
incentives, including making content submission mandatory and incorporating rewards into
performance measurement plans. Considerable controversy exists over whether such incentives work and no consensus has emerged. One strategy to KM involves actively managing knowledge (push strategy). In such an instance, individuals strive to explicitly encode their knowledge into a shared knowledge repository, such as a
database, as well as retrieving knowledge they need that other individuals have provided (codification). The form of the knowledge means that it's either
tacit or
explicit.
Data and
information can be considered as explicit and
know-how can be considered as tacit.
Hansen et al. defined the two strategies (codification and personalisation). Codification means a system-oriented method in KM strategy for managing explicit knowledge with organizational objectives. Codification strategy is document-centered strategy, where knowledge is mainly codified as "people-to-document" method. Codification relies on information infrastructure, where explicit knowledge is carefully codified and stored. Codification can therefore refer to both tacit and explicit knowledge. In contrast, personalisation encourages individuals to share their knowledge directly. Other knowledge management strategies and instruments for companies include: • Mapping knowledge competencies, roles and identifying current or future predicted gaps. • Defining for each chosen role the main knowledge that should be retained, and building rituals in which the knowledge is documented or transferred on, from the day they start their job. • Transfer of knowledge and information prior to employee departure by means of sharing documents, shadowing, mentoring, and more, • Proximity & architecture (the physical situation of employees can be either conducive or obstructive to knowledge sharing) •
Storytelling (as a means of transferring tacit knowledge) • Cross-project learning •
After-action reviews •
Knowledge mapping requires the organization to know what kind of knowledge organization it has, how it is distributed throughout the company, and how to efficiently use and re-use that knowledge. (a map of knowledge repositories within a company accessible by all) •
Communities of practice • Expert directories (to enable knowledge seeker to reach to the experts) •
Expert systems (knowledge seeker responds to one or more specific questions to reach knowledge in a repository) •
Best practice transfer • Knowledge fairs • Competency-based management (systematic evaluation and planning of knowledge related competences of individual organisation members) • Master–apprentice relationship, Mentor-mentee relationship,
job shadowing •
Collaborative software technologies (
wikis, shared bookmarking, blogs,
social software, etc.) • Knowledge repositories (
databases,
bookmarking engines, etc.) • Measuring and reporting
intellectual capital (a way of making explicit knowledge for companies) •
Knowledge brokers (some organisational members take on responsibility for a specific "field" and act as first reference on a specific subject) •
Knowledge farming (using
note-taking software to cultivate a
knowledge graph, part of
knowledge agriculture) • Knowledge capturing (refers to a process where trained people extract valuable or else desired knowledge from experts and embed it in databases)
Motivations Multiple motivations lead organisations to undertake KM. Typical considerations include: • Making available increased knowledge content in the
development and provision of
products and
services • Achieving shorter development cycles • Improving consistency of knowledge and standardized expert skills among staff • Facilitating and managing innovation and organisational learning • Leveraging
expertise across the organisation • Increasing
network connectivity between internal and external individuals • Managing business environments and allowing employees to obtain relevant insights and ideas appropriate to their work • Solving intractable or
wicked problems • Managing intellectual capital and assets in the workforce (such as the expertise and
know-how possessed by key individuals or stored in repositories) ==KM technologies==