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A widely accepted 'working definition' of knowledge management applied in worldwide organizations is available from the WWW Virtual Library on Knowledge Management:
In simpler terms, Knowledge Management seeks to make the best use of the knowledge that is available to an organization, creating new knowledge in the process.
It is helpful to make a clear distinction between knowledge on the one hand, and information and data on the other.
Information can be considered as a message. It typically has a sender and a receiver. Information is the sort of stuff that can, at least potentially, be saved onto a computer. Data is a type of information that is structured, but has not been interpreted.
Knowledge might be described as information that has a use or purpose. Whereas information can be placed onto a computer, knowledge exists in the heads of people. Knowledge is information to which an intent has been attached.
By the early nineties, it was clear that there were two distinct branches of Knowledge Management.
First generation Knowledge Management involves the capture of information and experience so that it is easily accessible in a corporate environment. An alternate term is "knowledge capture". Managing this capture allows the system to grow into a powerful information asset .
This first branch had its roots firmly in the use of technology. In this view Knowledge Management is an issue of information storage and retrieval. It uses ideas derived from systems analysis and management theory. This approach led to a boom in consultancies and in the development of so-called knowledge technologies. Typically first-generation Knowledge Management involved developing sophisticated data analysis and retrieval systems with little thought to how the information they contained would be developed or used. This led to organisations investing heavily in technological fixes that had either little impact or a negative impact on the way in which knowledge was used.
A typical scenario might have seen an organisation install a sophisticated intranet in order to categorize and disseminate information, only to find that the extra work involved in setting up the metadata meant that few within the organisation actually used the intranet. This occasionally led to management mandating the use of the intranet, resulting in resentment amongst staff, and undermining their trust in the organisation. Thus first generation solutions are often counterproductive.
Management theory functions as a branch of economicsEconomics is the social science studying how society uses its limited resources to meet desires and wants. Put otherwise, economics studies what, how and for whom society produces. This involves analyzing the production, distribution and consumption of go, and to a large extent it adopts econometricEconometrics literally means 'economic measurement'. It is the branch of economics that applies statistical methods to the empirical study of economic theories and relationships. It is a combination of mathematical economics, statistics, economic statisti standards. When it became apparent that it would be useful to be able to manage knowledge, it was natural for managers to attempt to apply their preferred econometric methods to the cause. But econometrics is about commodities and cash flow. It found it therefore necessary to treat knowledge as if it were a commodity.
This, of course, was a surprisingly difficult thing to do, essentially because knowledge is not a commodity but a process. But a suitable epistemology was found, in the form of that developed by Michael PolanyiMichael Polanyi ( March 11, 1891 February 22, 1976) was a Hungarian/ English polymath whose thought and work extended across physical chemistry, philosophy, theology and economics. Early life Michael was born into a Jewish family in Budapest, younger brot. Polanyi’s epistemology objectified the cognitive component of knowledge – learning and doing – by labelling it tacit knowledgeThe concept of tacit knowing comes from scientist and philosopher Michael Polanyi. By definition, tacit knowledge is not easily shared. One of Polanyi's famous aphorisms is: "We know much more than we can tell. Tacit knowledge consists often of habits and and for the most part removing it from the public view. Learning and doing became a 'black box' that was not really subject to management; the best that could be done was to make tacit knowledge explicit.
Its failure to provide any theoretical understanding of how organisations learn new things and how they act on this information meant that first generation Knowledge Management was incapable of managing knowledge creation.