| Author |
Title and
Publication Data |
Brief
Description & Link |
| John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid |
"Organizational
Learning and Communities of Practice: Toward A Unified View of Working, Learning and
Innovation" from Management
Science (February 1991) |
Brown and Duguid, both with Xerox’ Palo
Alto Research Center (PARC), wrote this seminal article about Communities of Practice in
1991. It is as relevant and useful today as when it was first written. |
| John Seely Brown and Estee Solomon Gray |
"The People Are the
Company" from Fast Company magazine (November 1995) |
Brown and Gray describe how companies such as
Xerox and National Semiconductor are learning to foster and support communities of
practice as a means of sharing knowledge. |
| John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid |
"Balancing Act:
How to Capture Knowledge Without Killing It" from Harvard Business Review
(May-June 2000) |
Brown and Duguid point up the important
distinction between a process orientation and a practice orientation and discuss how these
two orientations differ in their approach to capturing and deploying organizational
knowledge. |
| John Storck and Patricia A. Hill |
"Knowledge Diffusion
through Strategic Communities" from Sloan Management
Review (Winter 2000). |
The authors describe a "strategic
community of practice" consisting of a group of IT managers at Xerox. The point
of application is Xerox's transition from a proprietary IT architecture to an industry
standard. |
| Etienne Wenger |
"Communities of
Practice: Learning as A Social System" from the Systems
Thinker (June 1998) |
Wenger, the reigning authority on communities
of practice, describes in detail the nature, life cycle and functioning of a community of
practice. |
| Author |
Title and
Publication Data |
Brief
Description |
| Gary Abramson |
"On the KM
Midway" from CIO Enterprise Magazine (May 15,
1999) |
Abramson provides a useful review of the different
ways in which the major consulting firms approach knowledge management. |
| David Collins |
"Knowledge
Work or Working Knowledge? Ambiguity and Confusion in the Analysis of the Knowledge
Age" from the Journal of Systematic Knowledge Management
(March 1998). |
Collins, a professor at the University of
Sunderland, points out that confusion and ambiguity plague definitions of knowledge work
and efforts to manage knowledge. He goes on to suggest that the real focus for KM efforts
should be the ways in which working knowledge is distributed across a work force. |
| Thomas H. Davenport |
"Some Principles of
Knowledge Management" from Booz ·
Allen & Hamilton’s Strategy & Business (First Quarter, 1996) |
Davenport sets forth 10 principles by which
knowledge management efforts should be governed. Included is a brief case study drawn from
Hewlett-Packard. |
| Thomas H. Davenport, David W. DeLong and
Michael C. Beers |
"Building
Successful Knowledge Management Projects" by Tom Davenport, David DeLong and
Michael Beers. To access this and many other KM articles at the E&Y
site:
- Click on the link above
- Click on Knowledge Management
- Click on Knowledge-based Business Virtual Library
- Click on Knowledge & Organizations
|
In this E&Y Center for Business Innovation
working paper, a precursor to a Sloan Management Review article, Davenport,
DeLong and Beers describe four basic objectives for knowledge management projects, the
criteria they used to identify successful projects, and the qualities shared by the
successful projects. Based on a study of 31 companies. |
| Thomas H. Davenport |
"If
Only HP Knew What HP Knows..." from the Ernst & Young
Center for Business Innovation web site. |
Davenport reviews and describes several
knowledge management initiatives at Hewlett-Packard. |
| Leigh P. Donoghue, Jeanne G. Harris and Bruce
E. Weitzman |
"Knowledge
Management Strategies that Create Value" from Andersen
Consulting's Outlook Magazine |
The authors, all members of Andersen's Institute for
Strategic Change, make a persuasive case for tying knowledge management strategies to the
nature of the work processes in which knowledge is applied. |
| David A. Garvin |
"Building a Learning
Organization" from Harvard
Business Review (July-August 1993) |
Garvin's article is considered a "must read"
by those with an interest in learning organizations. |
| Morten T. Hansen, Nitin Nohria and Thomas
Tierney |
"What's
Your Strategy for Managing Knowledge" from Harvard Business Review (March-April 1999) |
Hansen and Nohria, both professors at the
Harvard Business School, and Tierney, the worldwide managing director of Bain &
Company, argue that companies must focus on one of two knowledge management strategies:
codification or personalization. |
| Justin Hibbard and Karen M. Carrillo |
"Knowledge Revolution" from Information
Week (January 5, 1998) |
Hibbard and Carrillo touch on human and
technological obstacles to knowledge management. |
| Joe Katzman |
"Lowering the Cost of
Knowledge" from Katzman’s web
site. |
Katzman examines the costs and other barriers
to sharing knowledge, suggesting that the costs of sharing are high and need to be reduced
before sharing will occur. |
| Fred Nickols |
"What
Is in The World of Work and Working" from Performance
& Instruction (October 1983) |
Nickols reviews the shift from manual to
knowledge work, contrasting the two in a useful table of characteristics and pointing out
some of the implications of this shift. |
| Fred Nickols |
"The Knowledge in Knowledge
Management" (in press), Knowledge Management Yearbook |
In this article, commissioned for the latest
issue of the Butterworth-Heinemann KM Yearbook, Nickols examines and integrates various
categories of knowledge: tacit, explicit, implicit, declarative and procedural. |
| Ikujiro Nonaka |
"The
Knowledge-Creating Company from the Harvard Business
Review (November-December 1991) |
Nonaka uses examples from Honda, Canon and
Sharp to illustrate how the Japanese approach to creating and exploiting new knowledge
differs from that of western companies. |
| Carla O’Dell |
"The Value of
Knowledge Management" from the Unisys Executive Magazine
web site. |
O’Dell, president of the American
Productivity and Quality Center (APQC), an organization noted for benchmarking efforts,
encourages executives to examine the value proposition offered by their company and to
link their knowledge management efforts to that proposition. |
| Patricia Seeman |
"A
Prescription for Knowledge Management" from Ernst &
Young’s Center for Business Innovation. |
Seeman, formerly Director of Knowledge Systems
for Hoffman-LaRoche, describes how knowledge management was used to speed up new product
launches, including getting through the FDA’s new drug application process more
quickly. |
| Thomas A. Stewart |
"Mapping
Corporate Brainpower" from FORTUNE (October 1995) |
Stewart covers the ways in which the large
consulting firms are managing knowledge in their own firms. |
| Thomas A. Stewart |
"Getting
Real About Brainpower" from FORTUNE (November 1995) |
Stewart, building on his earlier article about
how consulting firms are managing knowledge, shifts his focus to large companies (e.g.,
Monsanto and Hewlett-Packard). |