Knowledge Management (KM)

Knowledge management is an emerging discipline that promises to capitalize on organizations' intellectual capital. KM focuses on individual as an expert and as the bearer of important knowledge that he or she can systematically share with an organisation. KM supports not only the know-how of a company, but also the know-where, know-who, know-what, know-when and know-why.

The KM concept emerged in the mid-1980s from the need to derive knowledge from the "deluge of information" and was mainly used as a "business world" term. KM implementation and use has rapidly increased since the 1990s: 80 percent of the largest global corporations now have KM projects [Resource A]. Over 40 percent of Fortune 1000 companies now have a chief knowledge officer, a senior-level executive who creates an infrastructure and cultural environment for knowledge sharing [Resource B].

Besides, knowledge management also aimed at searching business practices, having originated in the business world as a method for unifying the vast amounts of information generated from meetings, proposeal, presentations, analytic papers, audits, engagements, clients and target profiles, training materials, CT's, contrats, and agreements, etc. When considered in the context of distributed field offices and practices of a global firm, the challnges of finiding, contextualizing and utilizing this disparate and unstructured data become exceptional.

Resource:

[a] G. Lawton, "Knowledge Management: Ready for Prime Time?" Computer, vol. 34, no. 2, Feb. 2001, pp. 12-14

[b] D.E.O’Leary, "Enterprise Knowledge Management," Computer, vol. 31, no.3 Mar. 1998, pp. 54-61