over a period of time in order to complete their assigned tasks. Each has to coordinate
the completion of the task with others in the organization (you with your instructor, at
least, and Dan with his supervisor and coworkers). Furthermore, it is easy to imagine
that if you and Dan are good at your tasks, others may want you to explain how it is
that you are so effective. They are likely to ask you to do so based on a desire to learn
to be more effective themselves or a desire to share your expertise with others. For
example, your university is likely to have developed guidelines, classes, and tutoring
sessions based on an analysis of effective paper writers such as yourself, in order to
help those who are less skilled at writing to be more effective. And Dan’s supervisor
is likely to want to pass on lessons learned from Dan to new employees or others who
are not as skillful as he is. What we have just described are some simple examples of
knowledge management. In both cases, knowledge important to the organization is
identified, codified, and exploited by the organization.
However, like many major management trends, KM is both ambiguous and
multi-faceted. Given the diversity of origins of the concept of knowledge
management, it is not surprising that the field has failed to arrive at a clear
understanding of exactly what KM means: “passing fad, significant trend, or
paradigm in its own right … toolbox of techniques or philosophy?” (McAdam &
McCreedy, 1999, p. 94). Neef (1999, p. 71), for example, reports on the puzzlement
of one senior executive he met, who complained that he could make neither head nor
tail of KM: “’Where’s the beef,’ he demanded.”
Knowledge has always been important to organizations, so when a member of
an organization today claims to have implemented KM, what exactly is meant? We
see at least four major uses of the KM label. The boundaries between these four uses
are somewhat fuzzy, yet they seem to capture the primary uses of the term.
First, and most typically, KM is used to describe a relatively comprehensive
program or strategy intended to manage an organization’s “intellectual capital” or
expertise. We will refer to this use of the term as KM
1
. Flanagin (2002) describes this
use of the term:
The dominant strategy has been to identify and develop technologies for the
capture, storage, retrieval, and dissemination of explicit knowledge. The chief
concern has been how to extract an individual’s knowledge, place it in a format
Convention