Knowledge management (KM) is emerging as an activity that demands increasing attention from management in today’s knowledge-based organizations.
Since the early 1990s there has been a constant stream of theoretical work on various aspects of KM as well as practical hands-on efforts in KM. As is frequently true of emerging fields, a bridge between theory and practice may be missing. On the one hand, too often KM theory highlights only parts of practical KM efforts, generalizes too broadly for use by an actual organization, or lacks value for people in the organization’s trenches. On the other hand, too often known practical lessons and guidelines discussed in the literature on theories of KM such as the importance of knowledge culture, the need for a critical mass, or the need for on-going evaluation are ignored or, at best, mentioned marginally. To bridge theory and practice, this work proposes one unified analytic framework for KM that will allow organizations to plan, implement, and evaluate their KM activities.
The proposed framework consisting of nine keys to a knowledge infrastructure is designed to be simple enough to work with as well as powerful enough to generate insights about KM insights that can lead to productive action.
This framework was used in work with a variety of organizations, high-tech and low-tech.
Concrete plans were derived from the keys. Experience has shown that the value of the keys stems mostly from their capacity to bring together the various players within a organization in a
unified KM effort.
The Full Report: http://www.pirp.harvard.edu/pubs/pdf-blurb.asp?id=474
Actual PDF file: http://pirp.harvard.edu/pubs_pdf/sivan/sivan-p01-1.pdf