Knowledge Management AN OVERVIEW.

AT THE CORE

* The following is an excerpt from William Saffady's Knowledge Management: A Manager's Briefing (1998). It provides an excellent foundation for the articles that follow.

Knowledge management was relatively unknown just a few years ago, but it is fast becoming one of the most widely publicized business initiatives.... In corporations, government agencies, and other organizations, knowledge management concepts and methods are enjoying the same enthusiastic reception that was given to business process reengineering in the early 1990s, to office automation in the early 1980s, and to distributed computing in the early 1970s.

What is Knowledge Management?

Knowledge management is an interdisciplinary field that draws on a variety of business activities and academic specializations. As its name suggests, knowledge management is concerned with systematic, effective management and utilization of an organization's knowledge resources. It encompasses the creation, storage, arrangement, retrieval, and distribution of an organization's knowledge.

The purpose of records management can be similarly stated: It is concerned with the systematic, effective management and utilization of an organization's recorded information. Records management encompasses the creation or receipt, through its processing, distribution, organization, storage, and retrieval to the ultimate disposition of recorded information. However, records--which have tangible manifestations in paper, photographic, or electronic media--are easier to conceptualize and identify than knowledge resources. Broadly defined, a knowledge resource is one that contains or embodies knowledge, but that definition does not sufficiently distinguish knowledge from recorded information.

Dictionary definitions equate knowledge with the accumulation and understanding of facts, ideas, principles, or skills. So defined, knowledge may be acquired through study, observation, and/or experience. In business, knowledge is gained by reading reports or other documents, by retrieving database records or other electronic information, by observing business processes or operations, by performing specific tasks, by participating in collaborative activities, or by a combination of these and other methods.

Although dictionary definitions of knowledge recognize slight variations in usage--the state of knowing is distinguished from a body of knowledge, for example--all definitions imply insight, comprehension, and mastery of recorded information as key characteristics and essential attributes of knowledge. Such insight, comprehension, and mastery clearly distinguish knowledge from information. The latter can be recorded and processed by computers or other machines; knowledge, by contrast, is information that has been processed and assimilated by humans or other living creatures.

Thus, recorded information is a precursor to and a precondition of knowledge; it is not identical to it. Knowledge is not acquired by merely possessing a document or accessing a database that contains information; the contents of the document or database must be read and understood. Further reflecting the critical significance of insight and comprehension, some theorists and researchers define knowledge as a set of beliefs about causal relationships between actions and their probable consequences. These observers stress the interrelationship of recorded information, knowledge, and action. In their view, knowledge is comprehended information that is capable of supporting action, while action is the application of knowledge.

Contending that the acquisition of knowledge depends on timely access to information, some observers equate knowledge management with the development of computer databases, data warehouses, and other automated information repositories. Some knowledge management experts adopt a human resources perspective that equates an organization's knowledge with the experience and...