ABSTRACT
In today’s work environment, we see a situation where knowledge and knowledge workers are an assumed part of many organizations. According to Jonathan Spira (2005), who has built a business (Basex) around serving the knowledge economy, “at the beginning of the 20th century, unskilled labor accounted for about 90% of the workforce, today that figure is closer to 20%.” Spira further estimates that “Knowledge workers spend at least 20% of their time each day searching. . . . That costs companies thousands of dollars per worker, and more significantly, delays completion of work.” He estimates that this lag-time costs businesses approximately $25B in 2004 – a number that would only increase, going forward. He quotes IBM’s Vice President of Strategy, Mike Wing, saying “We should be long past congratulating ourselves for the simple epiphany that intellectual capital is better than physical capital” – a comment that is indicative of why knowledge management is no longer an emerging concept that businesses should consider, but rather an imperative that has come into its own for any competitive business. These kinds of statistics demonstrate the significant role knowledge plays in defining both organizations and workers. Despite its 40-plus year history, the idea of an economy fueled by knowledge seems to have had its coming-out party in the 1990s, as evidenced by both investment in and research on knowledge management as a field – enough of a spike in interest to consider it as a management fad, but with characteristics to make it a fundamental part of a business (Swan, Newell, Scarbrough, & Hislop, 1999). Throughout this decade and beyond, companies began to act, through significant investment, on the corporate view of knowledge as an asset to be captured, valued, and marketed. This has been spurred by tremendous improvements in communication, storage, and search/retrieval technologies, improvements in business processes for sharing information, and the ongoing risk of attrition of old and new workers from Baby Boomer retirements to Gen Y’s habit of churning employment. The goal of these KM efforts has typically been that of making visible, systematizing, and cataloging organizational knowledge in a tangible, explicit form, generally through IT systems, or learning and development tools. To understand the scope of the investment, consider that the market size for basic content management systems alone is estimated to reach approximately $4B in the United States in 2010 (Rockley, 2006). The addition of newer forms of knowledge management systems, including blogs, wikis,
intranet and extranet sites, ERP systems, customer information systems, and the tracking and indexing of e-mails and text messages, will only accelerate this growth. Today, there is little argument in the business world that organizational knowledge exists, that it is valuable, and that it should be collected, monitored, and managed, and many organizations view organizational knowledge as a strategic asset, resulting in resources (people and dollars) being committed to systematize KM. The industry that has built up around KM has been a combination of IT systems developed to create large, searchable repositories and the development, usually in human resources (HR) departments, of extensive training materials and approaches to push information about documented processes to employees. Even in process-oriented KM environments, the primary measures of success often come from explicit documentation of process models, procedure steps, or other forms of tangible assets that can be catalogued and searched. As a result, KM has become heavily supported by IT departments or HR departments, sometimes simultaneously and/or competitively, and often with little coordination. This divide is sometimes referenced in association with the split between systematized and processoriented approaches to knowledge management. In both cases, thinking back to the analogy from Collison and Purcell (2004), the goal seems to be to “fill a lake” rather than to “bottle the source.” IT departments build repositories, search engines, and other technology-centric tools to capture and catalogue knowledge, while HR departments write process and training documents to provide individuals with a pre-determined set of steps by which they can navigate the organizational knowledge base. In both cases, efficient and effective KM is often presented as a strategic asset to a knowledge-based organization.
