Working Knowledge: How Organizations Manage What They Know.

• Author: CISCO, SUSAN L.
• Position: Review

TITLE: Working Knowledge: How Organizations Manage What They Know

ISBN: 0-87584-655-6

PUBLISHER: Harvard Business School Press

PUBLICATION DATE: 1998

LENGTH: 214 pages

PRICE: $36 members/$45 nonmembers

SOURCE: ARMA International Bookstore, http://www.arma.org or 888/298-9202

Knowledge is essentially the package of intuitions, opinions, experience, and wisdom that human beings bring to their tasks. The value of knowledge to organizations is explored in a new book entitled, Working Knowledge: How Organizations Manage What They Know.

The book's authors assert that knowledge has value in the economic sense and operates by market forces. State the authors: "We believe the only way to have a market that works well is, first of all, to recognize that market forces exist; second, to try to understand how it functions; and third, to make it more efficient." Applying what is known about markets to knowledge exchange can help organizations understand why exchange does and does not happen.

One of the strengths of Working Knowledge is that its findings and recommendations are based upon a thorough review of organizational behavior literature and a survey of knowledge management practices from 39 companies such as British Petroleum, Coca-Cola, Monsanto, and Texas Instruments. The authors have the appropriate credentials to support their literary approach. Laurence Prusak, executive director of the Institute for Knowledge Management, is a managing principal with IBM Global Services Consulting Group. His professional background includes work as a researcher and librarian at the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration and as a teacher of social and economic history at several universities.

Thomas Davenport is a professor in the Management Information Systems Department at the Boston University Graduate School of Management and director of the Andersen Consulting Institute for Strategic Change. He has also directed research at Ernst & Young, McKinsey & Company, and CSC Index.

The book contains numerous examples of good knowledge management practices that an organization may want to adopt such as knowledge fairs, which foster "serendipitous knowledge sharing across the lines of department or business units." Other examples include videoconferencing networks, apprenticeships, and formal mentoring programs. The authors emphasize that managing knowledge is more dependent on people than technology; however...