KM Resources

Context

©   Fred Nickols  2000
Many knowledge management (KM) efforts have been largely concerned with capturing, codifying and sharing the knowledge held by people in organizations. Some of management’s motives are obvious: the loss of skilled people through turnover, pressures to avoid reinventing the wheel, pressures for company-wide innovations in processes as well as products, and the accelerating rate with which new knowledge is being created.

The means of managing knowledge in an organization should not be confused with the aims of managing it. On this latter point there is widespread agreement.

The basic aim of knowledge management is to leverage knowledge to the organization’s advantage.

Tom Davenport and his colleagues have identified four broad objectives of knowledge management projects (see their paper Successful KM Projects in the articles section of this site).

  1. create knowledge repositories
  2. improve knowledge access
  3. enhance the knowledge environment
  4. manage knowledge as an asset

These four goals offer a convenient means of seeing knowledge management in relation to two other terms commonly found in KM-related discussions: intellectual capital and the learning organization.

Intellectual capital (IC) may be thought of as the fruits of knowledge applied. In some cases this is new knowledge. Sometimes it takes the form of patents. On occasion it is represented by what is commonly known as "proprietary technology" or know-how. This term, then, is most closely associated with goal 4 above, managing knowledge as an asset. Tom Stewart, a senior editor at FORTUNE, has written extensively on this subject (see the Articles and Books pages on this site for more sources about intellectual capital).

The learning organization (LO) is best thought of as the kind of place where sharing knowledge and access to it are actively and aggressively supported. Peter Senge’s best seller, The Fifth Discipline, is credited with launching what some call the learning organization movement. The learning organization most clearly relates to goal 3 above, enhancing the knowledge environment.

The relationships just described may be depicted as shown in the diagram below.

km_diagram.gif (5141 bytes)

As the diagram above suggests, there are many different kinds of KM applications.

Go to KM Applications

 
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Fred Nickols may be reached by e-mail at nickols@att.net.

 
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This page last updated on September 5, 2004