Knowledge management

Knowledge management is a discipline which emerged under that name from 1995 onwards. The concept has been hyped to a great extent, resulting in many initiatives being left again. Despite this, the intent of knowledge management is widely acknowledged and involves various disciplines.

"Schools" of Knowledge Management

The schools of knowledge management are based on article of Michael Earl, here he defines three approaches rooted in different disciplines. The approaches are technocratic, economic and behavioral. The schools of knowledge management stem from various disciplines, ranging from Philosophy, Computer Science, Sociology, Epistemology, Management to Economics. The subsets of schools resulted from a research using case studies, interviews and litertature. The schools are not mutually exclusive, quite on the contrary. These can be used for education, analysis, formulating strategies and research.

Systems (Technocratic)

The systems approach focuses on specific domains. For such a domain knowledge is codified and stored in knowledge bases, this relies hevaily on technology. Typical examples are "Conventional" Databases, Decision support Systems and Reference websites. Important Critical Success Factors of this approach are, among others, Content Validation, Incentives to provide content and showing the importance to the organization.

Engineering (Technocratic)

The scope of the engineering school is on bringing knowledge to activities where the knowledge is required. In short it comes down on centralized knowledge and decentralized application of knowledge.

Cartographic (Technocratic)

The Cartographic approach focuses more on an organization/enterprise level, spanning multiple domains. The Cartographic approach does not attempt to codify the knowledge itself, but rather provides "maps" to knowledge. This can be both to explicit as well as tacot knowledge.

It works well in decentralized organizations and requires means for connectivity; i.e. self-service profiles/facebases, knowledge directories, instant-messaging, on-line collaboration etc. Some critical success factors are a set of knowledge networks combined with a culture or incentive-system motivating it to share knowledge. Adding to this an organization should trust in personalized knowledge.