Knowledge management finally becomes mainstream.

• Author: Duffy, Jan
• Position: Knowledge Management

Knowledge management (KM) is finally catching on and might even be considered mainstream by some. Earlier this year, CIO magazine polled its Web site visitors, typically CIOs and business people who deal with IT issues, asking them, "Does your company have a KM initiative underway?" (Rutherford 2001) Of the 330 respondents, 56.7 percent, or 187 respondents, answered "yes." It could safely be said that the majority of organizations in this survey are dabbling in KM. However, there is still some confusion about precisely what knowledge management is. "Dabbling" could mean that an organization is doing many things, not all of them focused on 'access to the unstructured information considered a defining characteristic of "knowledge." But as long as activities capitalize on the organization's intellectual assets, it doesn't really matter.

The July 2001 edition of www.Brint.com, a Web site devoted to KM, had three article titles relating to the latest KM news:

* "Japanese Leading Groupware Company Seriously Knocks the Door..." - Software Wire

* "Content Management Integrates Digital Assets Technology" - Content Wire

* "House Leader Attacks Agency Information Sharing" - Government Executive

These articles suggest that

* collaboration is important to KM

* managing content plays a significant role

* information sharing, while important, must respect privacy

These three elements are absolutely essential to the successful introduction of knowledge management principles.

Collaboration

Most of us work with other people, exchanging ideas, thoughts, and suggestions without a second thought. But when attention is drawn to this interaction and the idea of formalizing it, we somehow get cold feet. What was an enjoyable, voluntary, and often spontaneous activity is now something we are expected to do routinely. This is a paradox of the Internet Economy, in which we live and work.

In the book e-Volve, Rosabeth Moss Kanter points out that "... recognizing the ways in which it (KM) intersects with social institutions and human relationships ... poses three challenges to everyone engaged with the Internet:

1. The Internet can greatly empower and connect people, but it can also isolate and marginalize them.

2. The Internet can enable user communities to form and grow, but it can also use them to attack and deny.

3. The Internet can help build businesses and communities, but it can also destroy them" (Moss Kanter 2001).

Capitalizing on the technologies available today requires the development of special relationships among the people who use them. Technology as a simple, labor-saving device only required that we develop the physical skills to use it expertly (e.g., secretaries learned how to type, data entry clerks learned how to keypunch, assembly line workers learned how to operate riveting machines, paper makers learned how to mix pulp). The individual knowledge and experience we developed helped us do our jobs, but using these attributes really had little to do with the technology.

Today, technology is not just a labor-saving device; it is totally embedded in the work we do. Look at a business process and its activities: In many cases, the hand-off between individuals who perform specific tasks takes place inside the technology. In the wired world of work, the record (information and...