Towards a Strategy for Knowledge Management

Knowledge management is emerging as a significant organizational and management challenge. The pressures of the emergence of the global knowledge economy, and recognition of knowledge as a key and intangible asset are making the effective management of knowledge a priority. This surge of interest has paid relatively little attention to the object of management-knowledge. Epistemologists and sociologists have produced a variety of definitions and classifications, but there is no consensus. However, with the growth in IT capability, a clear operational distinction can be drawn between information and knowledge. The former can be captured, stored and transmitted in digital form. The latter can only exist in an intelligent system. This distinction is used to develop models of the interaction between knowledge and information, and of the appropriate balance between the two in different situations. On the basis of this model, the challenges of 'knowledge management' are: Establishing and optimizing the information-knowledge balance appropriate to (or providing a competitive advantage) a company or industry; Implementing IT-based productivity improvements in information management; Implementing people- and socially-based mechanisms to enhance knowledge management; Explicitly addressing the knowledge-information interface and mechanisms for improving the processes of transition from information to knowledge, and from knowledge to information; Identifying and maintaining the core knowledge of an organization.