Index of Links to Knowledge Management Websites.

Some ideas for getting started in learning about Knowledge Management.

Table of Contents for this page:

See Also: corresponding indexes of articles for Learning Organizations, E-Learning and Self-directed Learning web resources.

Preface

This page contains an index of websites providing information and resources concerning Knowledge Management. It is adapted from the content of a similar index posted on the internal intranet at Alberta Learning.

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Knowledge Management Websites

The CyberCity Initiative aims to help Grande Prairians to learn about and prepare to participate and compete in the Information Revolution that is sweeping the developed world. In addition to the index of Knowledge Management websites below, the CyberCity Mailing List (Selected Current Topic Indexes) contains an index of Knowledge Management articles. See also the article "Two Effective Ideas for Continuous Learning" in the digest of 7 October 1999 for an overview and introduction to the related concepts: "Knowledge Management" and "Learning Organization".

"Knowledge will forever govern ignorance,
and that people who mean to be their own governors
must arm themselves with the power that knowledge gives."

-- James Madison.

Below is a preliminary index of Knowledge Management websites. If you have suggested additions to this list, please let us know.

See also - the CyberCity article "Learning: The Critical Technology for Today" in the digest of 1 April 1999 for a discussion of learning preferences and techniques, how adult learning differs from child learning, how teacher-centered learning differs from learner-centered learning, and the significance of the latter in the Information Age.

Most of these references are outside the City of Grande Prairie website, and are therefore linked so as to open a new window in your browser. To return here, just close the new window.

[Since the formal sharing of information, understanding and knowledge is often used in Learning Organizations, we have also posted corresponding indexes of articles on a Learning Organizations web page and on E-Learning and Self-directed Learning web pages. The intersection of "knowledge management" and the "learning organization" is stated very well in the Kienholz paper below.]

• Gene Bellinger, a principal at Outsights (a management consultancy; about) has posted "Knowledge Management: Emerging Perspectives" (9 pp, including 5 pp of links). He provides an introduction to the continuum from raw data to information (seeing how data elements relate), to knowledge (recognizing patterns in the information), to wisdom (understanding the principles governing the patterns); and he provides extensive references and links to related Knowledge Management resources. A couple of definitions are excerpted below along with a link to a paper.
• • Knowledge management would be the capture, retention, and reuse of the foundation for imparting an understanding of how all these pieces fit together and how to convey them meaningfully to some other person.
  • The Value of Knowledge Management relates directly to the effectiveness with which the managed knowledge enables the members of the organization to deal with today's situations and effectively envision and create their future.
  • His practical paper "Knowledge Sharing Impact on Group Problem Solving Productivity" (3 pp) provides a step-by-step description of the factors involved when a shared knowledge base (supported by a specific software product) is used to speed answers to customer inquiries.

• "Knowledge Management," an article by Verna Allee at the Integral Performance Group consultancy (values and mission) defines Knowledge Management as a combination of an object view (databases, documents, technologies for sharing knowledge), and a process view (human learning dynamics, collaborative problem solving). She identifies a Dozen Principles of Knowledge Management:
• • Knowledge is "messy."
  • Knowledge is self-organizing.
  • Knowledge seeks community.
  • Knowledge travels on language.
  • Knowledge is slippery.
  • Looser is probably better.
  • Knowledge keeps changing.
  • Knowledge does not grow forever--something eventually dies or is lost.
  • No one is really in charge.
  • You cannot impose rules and systems.
  • There is no silver bullet.
  • How you define the knowledge "problem" determines what and how you try to manage.

• The Knowledge Management Resource Center, hosted by an Atlanta consultancy (about), posts a number of high quality pages on Knowledge Management principles, resources, etc., all with annotated links. Their Knowledge Management Explorer page contains over a dozen KM subject areas, including Introduction to Knowledge Management, Knowledge Links (and other links), news, communities, periodicals, university sites, conferences, products/services, case studies and many more.

• Karl-Erik Sveiby, principal at the Sveiby Knowledge Management consultancy, and professor at the Macquarie Graduate School of Management, Macquarie University, posts a Library of links to his and other articles on Knowledge Management. Introductory examples include The Knowledge Organisation, Test Your Tacit Knowledge (an example of a complex, easy to do but hard to explain activity), a Description of Tacit Knowledge, Welcome to the Knowledge Organization (showing contrasts with Industrial Organizations), an introductory article "What is Knowledge Management," which distinguishes between management of information systems and management of people, their information sharing processes, etc.

• 
   
  The Sveiby Knowledge Management site also posts a paper by Hirotaka Takeuchi, "Beyond Knowledge Management: Lessons from Japan," which deals with Japanese emphasis on the importance of creating and sharing tacit knowledge (and using the organizational model of a living organism), as opposed to the western emphasis on management of explicit knowledge (and using the model of an information processing machine), etc.

  • "What Western companies need to do is to "unlearn" their existing view of knowledge and pay more attention to (1) tacit knowledge, (2) creating new knowledge, and (3) having everyone in the Organisation be involved. Only then can the Organisation be viewed as a living organism capable of creating continuous innovation in a self-organising manner."
  • "The central wealth-creating activities will be neither the allocation of capital to productive uses nor 'labour'... Value is now created by "productivity" and "innovation", both applications of knowledge to work."
  • "human knowledge is created and expanded through social interaction between tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge. This interaction gives rise to four modes of 'knowledge conversion': (1) from tacit to tacit, which is called socialisation, (2) from tacit to explicit, or externalisation, (3) from explicit to explicit, or combination, and (4) from explicit to tacit, or internalisation."
  • "[T]he responsibility for knowledge management initiatives in the West rests with the selected few, [whereas, in] Japan, creating new knowledge is not the responsibility of the selected few but that of everyone in the organisation."

  
  The Sveiby Knowledge Management site also describes the Tango Simulation (which "provides participants with an introduction to the concepts of valuing and managing intangible assets"). An article "Teaching Knowledge Management and Intellectual Capital Lessons: An Empirical Examination of the Tango Simulation" describes "how well people can build on their understanding of knowledge management," and how Tango can affect that process.

• Mark McElroy of Macroinnovation Associates (about), and formerly a principal at IBM's Knowledge Management Consulting Practice, has posted three insightful papers:
• • "Double-Loop Knowledge Management," (Aug 1999; 10 pp in .PDF format),
  • "Second-Generation Knowledge Management" (also Aug 1999; 9 pp in .PDF format), and
  • "Complexity's Killer Application" (Jan 2000; 17 pp in .PDF format).
  • "Managing For Sustainable Innovation" (June 2000; 8 pp in .PDF format).

  These papers describe the evolution of Knowledge Management from the initial collection and sharing of explicit knowledge through an expanded emphasis on the collaborative creation of new knowledge, its relation to learning organizations, and more. The last paper suggests the use of complexity theory (principles found in operation of weather systems, animal populations or other living systems) to describe (and assist with understanding of) business systems in a fast-moving, fiercely competitive electronic economy. In mid-2000 he posted an on-line simulation with which visitors can experiment. "This simulation allows visitors to experiment with various knowledge-related policy combinations in a fictitious organization, and to witness the corresponding impact on the rate and quality of innovation. Downstream effects on the organization's bottom-line financial performance are reported, as well." The simulation requires the Flash plug-in (a link to which is provided).

• The Institute for Professional Development (IPD; about; news release), created by the University of Alberta and TELUS in 2000 to "promote the advanced study and innovative practice in continuing professional development at the University of Alberta, across the province and around the world," has been developing expertise in Knowledge Management. They host a Knowledge Management portal jointly with the U of A Winspear Business Reference Library.

• IS World Net is a consortium of academics whose mission is to promote the development of an information infrastructure that will dramatically improve the world's ability to use information systems for creating, disseminating, and applying knowledge. They post a substantial list of contributors, sponsor a mailing list, and provide links to research and scholarship, teaching and learning, and a great deal more.

• Dr. Doug Kiel of the University of Texas at Dallas has posted "Knowledge Management, Organizational Intelligence and Learning, and Complexity," a very short paper with some informal definitions, including one for complexity.
• • "The process of learning is as important as what the organization knows, and improvements in both should be sought."
  • "A learning organization is capable of generative learning and proactively seeks to master change processes."
  • "Organizational intelligence is greater than the sum of the knowledge of each individual in that organization; [it includes] historical knowledge inherent in the organization and generative intelligence that results from collaboration between organizational members."

• Larry Prusak, the executive director of IBM's Institute for Knowledge Management in Cambridge, Mass., was interviewed by CIO magazine in "KM Gets Real." Prusak says that KM efforts around groups "who share common context, stories and passion, around a subject," for example, is better than one focused on the individual or the enterprise. He also mentions that effective results emerge when KM is applied to innovation and replication, and when it is applied to the diffusion and absorption of information within the enterprise.

• Alice Kienholz has posted "Systems ReThinking: An Inquiring Systems Approach to the Art and Practice of the Learning Organization." In this excellent paper describing the intersection of the "learning organization" and "knowledge management," she proposes "that inquiring systems, as presented by C. West Churchman in his classic work The Design of Inquiring Systems, (1971) possess the necessary scope by which to elucidate and facilitate the acceleration and advancement of organizational learning for knowledge acquisition, creation and utilization. This paper builds on the application of Churchman's inquiring systems to learning organizations for "Inquiring Organizations" as proposed by Courtney, Croasdell and Paradice (1996, 1998). It also builds on the application of knowledge management in these inquiring organizations, as outlined by Malhotra (1997; "Knowledge Management in Inquiring Organizations"), by providing a readily available means by which to expedite the shift in thinking needed to accommodate the demands of a faster, more complex cycle of knowledge creation and action. By understanding and being aware of one's own relative preference for each of the five major inquiring systems, as determined by the Inquiry Mode Questionnaire (InQ), organizational members have a greater awareness and understanding of the way in which they, individually and collectively, go about gathering data, asking questions, solving problems and making decisions (Harrison and Bramson, 1982). Implications exist for applications in knowledge management, especially as it pertains to how people actually go about acquiring, creating and sharing knowledge." Kienholz uses Churchman's five philosophically based inquiring modes for understanding how we go about gathering data, asking questions, solving problems and making decisions:
• • The Synthesist (Hegel) sees likenesses in things that appear unalike, seeks conflict and synthesis, is interested in change, gets at underlying assumptions, sees the essence of problems, is speculative - asks what if and why not, and regards data to be meaningless without interpretation.
  • The Idealist (Kant) welcomes a broad range of views, seeks ideal solutions, is interested in values, is receptive, and places equal value on data and theory.
  • The Pragmatist (Singer) proceeds on the basis of an eclectic view, uses a tactical, incremental approach; and, being innovative and adaptive, is best in complex situations.
  • The Analyst (Leibniz) seeks the "one best way," operates with models and formulas, is interested in "scientific solutions," is prescriptive, and prefers data over theory and method.
  • The Realist (Locke) relies on "facts" and expert opinion, seeks solutions that meet current needs, is serious about getting concrete results, acts with efficiency and incisive correction, prefers data over theory.

  And she relates their strengths to each of Senge's five disciplines.

• An English summary of the "Organizational Learning and Knowledge Management Project for Social Services in the National Program for Children at Risk" has been posted by the Israeli Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs Strategic Planning Division. "This paper describes a project for organizational learning and knowledge management ... at the eight pilot agencies participating in the National Program for Children at Risk and Family Violence. It describes the project's course to date, sketches a preliminary summary, and outlines targets for further work."
• • "Public organizations have a need to learn, both in order to fulfill their mission and in order to survive the competition for funding and clients."
  • In this project, "we ask two questions: How public organizations in general, and social service organizations in particular, learn and manage knowledge, and how the Ministry of Labor and Social affairs and its partners can be of assistance for these purposes."
  • The project's goals were:
  • • To construct an organizational "memory": to harvest the professional knowledge of the pilot agencies' staff, raising the quality of services delivered to children and their families.
    • To formulate a learning methodology: to learn how social workers and social service organizations create, acquire, and disseminate knowledge coming from practice.

• John Seely Brown, Chief Scientist at Xerox Corporation (Palo Alto Research Center, or PARC) has posted "Organizational learning and communities-of-practice: Toward a unified view of working, learning, and innovation." The paper summarizes (from the classic Xerox case study) important contrasts between formal job descriptions, diagnostic procedures and training of service technicians on the one hand with their actual practices and training needs on the other. It points out how an organization's reliance on these formal descriptions can actually impair the work, the workers' learning and their motivation when social and contextual portions of the work are not recognized. It also points out how an informal (then formalized) community of practice (or learning organization) developed by these technicians helped to identify and solve important repair dilemmas. [Watch for words with "tt" in them; the t's are missing in every case.]
• • "The insight accumulated [by the service reps] is not a private substance, but socially constructed and distributed," whereas "in the corporation's eyes their work is viewed [only] individually."
  • Service reps "cultivate connections throughout the corporation to help them circumvent the barriers to understanding built by their documentation and training."
  • "In telling these stories [of successful diagnoses made outside the bounds of the formal repair procedures] an individual rep contributes to the construction and development of his or her own identity as a rep and reciprocally to the construction and development (and knowledge management) of the community of reps in which he or she works."
  • Other authors, he notes "have rejected [knowledge] transfer models, which isolate knowledge from practice, and developed a view of learning as social construction, putting knowledge back into the contexts in which it has meaning. ... What is learned is profoundly connected to the conditions in which it is learned."
  • "Learning ... involves becoming an 'insider.' Learners do not receive or even construct abstract, 'objective,' individual knowledge; rather, [what] they learn [is] to function in a community. ... Workplace learning is best understood ... in terms of the communities being formed or joined and personal identities being changed. The central issue in learning is becoming a practitioner not learning about practice."

  An index of a few of Brown's other papers may also be of interest, including "Situated Cognition and the Culture of Learning." In this paper, Brown asserts that "learning is not a process of delivering information to individuals. Rather, the paper proposes, all learning has apprenticeship-like properties. Understood this way, both learning and teaching look significantly different."

• Martin Ryder, at the School of Education at the University of Colorado at Denver, has posted "Organizational Learning and Knowledge Management" (2 pp), a current compendium of links to websites dealing with both subjects.

• Consultant Joe Katzman posts "Knowledge Management Pages" among his articles, in which "links are labeled on a scale from Basic (B) to Intermediate (I) and Expert (X) level. They are also rated on a 5-star scale."

• The Management Assistance Program (MAP) for nonprofits in Minnesota hosts an excellent library of links to management resources, and lists Knowledge Management links, Learning Organization links and Balanced Scorecard links in their Organizational Performance section. "MAP provides management consulting and board recruitment services to more than 600 organizations each year and engages over 700 volunteers in helping manage nonprofit organizations." They also host a page of links for Systems Thinking.

• The Open Directory Project posts links to resources in their Knowledge Management category where Learning Organization is listed as a component.

• The Lycos Directory contains, in their Reference section: Knowledge Management.

• The Knowledge Management Project (Table of Contents) at the Graduate School of Business, University of Texas at Austin posts "KM Publications" (8 pp), which contains references to books and links to articles and papers on Knowledge Management and related topics. They also post "Some Principles of Knowledge Management" (1998; 6 pp) by Thomas H. Davenport, PhD., a Knowledge Management guru at UT whose website it appears to be. [See also links to other Davenport articles in CIO Magazine below].

• Fred Nickols (home page; articles) has posted a KM Overview, "Knowledge Management: What's It All About?" The article provides a short overview, some alternative management responses and identifies the "Central Issue" ("... being able to bring relevant, valid knowledge to bear--at will.").

• The Knowledge Science Institute (KSI) was formed at the University of Calgary in 1985 (proposal document) with a mandate to study all aspects of the knowledge economy. The KSI has a wide range of multi-disciplinary theoretical and practical research activities. For example, it:
• • tracks social and economic trends involving information technology,
  • develops operational models of knowledge processes in society,
  • innovates in knowledge acquisition, representation and dissemination technologies,
  • organizes scientific meetings concerned with knowledge processes, and
  • collaborates with other research organizations concerned with knowledge systems.

• George Pór of Vision Nest Publishing has posted "The Quest for Collective Intelligence," (1995; 7 pp) which emphasizes that "organizations will succeed in these times of accelerating changes ... only if they develop a high level of collective intelligence, or intellectual capital," and distinguishes that from the sum of the individual intelligence of the participants. He identifies four enabling functions which these organizations must cultivate [(1) communication, (2) coordination, (3) memory/knowledge management, and (4) learning], and describes how they operate and interact.

• The American Productivity and Quality Center (APQC) has posted the executive summary of their study "Creating a Knowledge Sharing Culture" (and an order form for the entire report). They also post a paper "Overcoming the 'Cultural Barriers' to Sharing Knowledge," which provides a good overview of how specific companies linked knowledge sharing with everyday work and with corporate cultural values. The paper includes lots of good examples from the case studies, and mentions that:
  • "The study's central finding is that however strong your commitment and approach to knowledge management, your culture is stronger."
  • "We found that organizations with a culture that supports sharing knowledge have the following characteristics:
    • There is a visible link between sharing knowledge and solving practical business problems.
    • Knowledge sharing is tightly linked to a preexisting core value of the organization.
    • The organization introduces the approach, tools, and structures to support knowledge sharing in a way that matches the overall style of the organization.
    • Knowledge-sharing activities build on existing networks people use in their daily work.
    • Peers and immediate supervisors of those actively involved in sharing knowledge support, even exert, pressure to share. There is an appropriate level of senior management support and involvement."
  • "All the best-practice companies we studied see sharing knowledge as a practical way to solve business problems. ... In fact, they overwhelmingly said that, in their experience, the main reason knowledge management programs fail is a lack of a clear connection with a business goal."
  • "[O]ur findings suggest that it is most important for the style of your effort to match how things get done in your organization."
  • "At [one company], 'leveraging' what you know by educating colleagues, writing, helping others, and teaching junior staff members has been central to the company since its inception. 'Leveraging' what you know is how you build a reputation as a world-class thought leader. Without evidence of 'leveraging' it is not possible to be promoted to partner. As a senior manager said, 'It's not what you know that gives you power; it's what you share about what you know that gives you power'."
  • "[A]ll the best-practice companies said that unambiguous support from direct managers is an important enabler of knowledge sharing."

• The Brint Knowledge Portal posts extensive links to Knowledge Management articles and papers, including those of its founder Dr. Yogesh Malhotra. A few articles are cited below, each containing further links to related articles.
  • Knowledge Management for the New World of Business (1998; 5 pp) - "Knowledge Management caters to the critical issues of organizational adaptation, survival and competence in face of increasingly discontinuous environmental change.... Essentially, it embodies organizational processes that seek synergistic combination of data and information processing capacity of information technologies, and the creative and innovative capacity of human beings. ... Today's business world does not put a premium on playing by pre-defined rules but on understanding and adapting, as the rules of the game--as well as the game itself--keep changing."
  • Knowledge Management, Knowledge Organizations and Knowledge Workers: A View from the Front Lines (1998; 4 pp) - "This concept embodies a transition from the recently popular concept of 'information value chain' to a 'knowledge value chain.' What is the difference? The information value chain considers technological systems as key components guiding the organization's business processes, while treating humans as relatively passive processors that implement 'best practices' archived in information databases. In contrast, the knowledge value chain treats human systems as key components that engage in continuous assessment of information archived in the technological systems. In this view, 'best practices' are not implemented without active inquiry by the human actors. Human actors engage in an active process of sense making to continuously assess the effectiveness of 'best practices.' The underlying premise is that 'best practices' of yesterday may not be taken for granted as 'best practices' of today or tomorrow. Hence, double loop learning, unlearning and relearning processes need to be designed into the organizational business processes."
  • Their web page "Knowledge Management and Organizational Learning" contains extensive Knowledge Management information and links, but not much on Organizational Learning.
  • The article "Knowledge Management for E-Business Performance: Advancing Information Strategy to 'Internet Time'" (May, 2000; 10 pp; .PDF format) relates the management of the knowledge held by employees and business innovation. It also makes a strong distinction between information (mainly stored and distributed by computer systems), and knowledge (mainly held and acted on by employees).

• The Special Interest Group on Supporting Group Work of the Association for Computing Machinery posts a "Knowledge Management - General Information and Resources" web page.

• The Institute for Learning Technologies (about) at Teachers College, Columbia University works to advance the role of computers and other information technologies in education and society. Through its program of practice, the Institute seeks to empower the creative reform of education through three types of work with technology:
  • implementing, according to constructivist principles, real-world projects using multimedia and network technologies to create sophisticated learning environments;
  • sponsoring exploratory development and participatory design efforts to discover the academic potentials of emerging technologies; and
  • sustaining public policy initiatives that mobilize broad coalitions of interested parties from academe, government and industry in order to transform education.

• The Digital Commerce Center at the University of Southern California (related USC links) posts an "Organizational Knowledge" page with links to papers, case studies, conferences, etc.

• Educom Review posts an interview with Mike Fitzgerald, "Toward a Model of Distributed Learning" in which Fitzgerald talks about how colleges and universities will need to change to accommodate distance learning (or distance knowledge management).
  • "I think that's a very different model of higher education, which is interesting because what it is doing, in a sense, is it is seeing the main, original thrust of higher education, which in the UK was the Oxbridge model, as a tradition being recovered as a way of individuating mass higher education--so that mass higher education is not something where everybody does the same thing. The question is, how can we actually individuate it? I think that's what is really exciting about new technologies, communications, and the network. I'm much more interested in the communications and the network than I am interested in the technology. It's the network that is probably the metaphor for the university of the twenty-first century. ... it puts back at the heart of the teaching/learning process the notion of active students and active faculty."
  • "The problem for universities is that IT is [presently] seen as a one-off cost, which you capitalize. You've really got to see it as a much more strategic, continuing infrastructure cost. It is now a utility cost, like electricity and water."
  • "The interesting thing, of course, is how we translate information into knowledge and how we then translate knowledge into learning. It's the knowledge/learning access that universities and colleges bring to the table. It's not our job simply to provide access to information. There are many people now who can do that arguably far better than we can. We need to take that information and turn it into knowledge and turn it into learning, and what we're talking about then are Web-enabled communications."
  • "What needs to be remembered is that distributed learning is not only about high tech; it is also about high touch and about support for students both individually and as a community of learners."
  • "Most important, this isn't a vision for the future. It's a necessity for today. Education is the key, the economic and social driver of our countries. The reason education matters is not that education is primarily about knowledge or about skills or about competence. Education is primarily about confidence--the confidence to learn, the confidence to grow, the confidence to ask questions and not always have the answers, the confidence to dream your dreams and realize your aspirations not only for your own sake but for the sake and the benefit of our society as a whole."

• The Knowledge Management Group (KMG) at the School of Information Studies, Faculty of Science and Agriculture, Charles Sturt University in Australia explores knowledge management techniques and their applications; and conducts R&D projects in Viticulture, Information Management and Libraries.

• The Business Processes Resource Centre at the University of Warwick in the U.K., (about) posts the "Knowledge Management" website. It includes definitions, KM papers (including "Network Nirvana: The management of knowledge in the postmodern organization"), KM events and further links.

• The Technology in Education Institute posts "Creating a Knowledge Centric IT Environment" (1996, with a 1999 update; 6 pp) by David B Harris, which provides good introductory information and focuses on knowledge transfer as opposed to problem solving in an Information Technology department. The principles may also apply outside IT departments.

• The Knowledge Sharing Effort (KSE) Public Library website (overview of the KSE), hosted by Stanford University's Knowledge Systems Lab, in their Department of Computer Science, contains ontologies, papers, e-mail lists, a software library, and more, all devoted to the topic of knowledge sharing. "The Knowledge Sharing Effort is a consortium to develop conventions facilitating sharing and reuse of knowledge bases and knowledge based systems. The goal of the effort is to define, develop, and test infrastructure and supporting technology to enable participants to build much bigger and more broadly functional systems than could be achieved working alone. The output of the effort consists of (1) public-domain specifications and implementations of supporting technology; (2) reports, papers, and technical articles; (3) a reusable public library of proof-of-concept demonstrations."

• The Net Academy on Knowledge Media (overview; mission; FAQ) at the Institute for Media Communications Management at at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland provides a forum for exchange of information about Knowledge Media.
  • "The term knowledge medium refers to an information network with semi-automated services for the generation, distribution, and consumption of knowledge. The goal of building a new knowledge medium is to tie expert systems and communication media together into a greater whole."

• They also post a Knowledge Management Link Collection, a blurb on their background and history, etc.

• Executive Information Systems, Inc., posts "Basic Concepts of Knowledge Management," by Joseph M. Firestone, Ph.D., along with an index of a dozen or more reports, papers and briefs, mainly by the same author, with abstracts. The papers are in schollarly format, with footnotes, references, etc. The paper "Accelerated Innovation and KM Impact" (16 pp; .PDF format) contains helpful definitions of the components of knowledge management activities and relates them to a Knowledge Life Cycle Model (knowledge production, validation and application).

• Knowledge Management Central, at the International Center for Applied Studies in Information Technology (ICASIT; their Teaching Innovations project) in the Institute for Public Policy, George Mason University posts indexes of case studies, articles, and other Knowledge Management resources.

• Informal but fairly extensive indexes of on-line Knowledge Management resources are posted by:
  • the Special Libraries Association: "Selected References on Knowledge Management,"
  • several Malaysian graduate students: "Knowledge Management Links," and
  • the Libraries at James Madison University: "Knowledge Management Resources on the Internet."

• Knowledge World posts a Knowledge Management index and treats Learning Organizations as a subset.

• Knowledge Management Magazine posts in its September, 1999 issue, "Nine Rules for Making KM Work." The article points out that "the bottom line of your business is knowledge."
  • "Corporate-wide knowledge sharing will yield results beyond every expectation. Knowledge sharing will become an integral part of our daily work. This will occur as we shift our thinking away from facilitating knowledge transfer in support of disparate initiatives to a realization that our businesses are knowledge, period."

• The magazine also posts "Return on Knowledge: Proving financial payoffs from knowledge management investments plagues experienced and novice practitioners." The article points out that:

  • "... we've seen new models emerge from the intellectual capital (IC) realm to help business managers make better decisions about investing in KM. Furthermore, companies are more adept at targeting their tactical KM initiatives and are consequently seeing more tangible payoffs."
  • "... a growing group of experts and practitioners have found value in going through the process of developing metrics. They contend that it forces managers to make explicit their tacit assumptions on how the business operates."
  • "[now] metrics systems have been used as communication devices for explaining strategic goals. By enabling companies to thoughtfully narrow their various improvement projects into a more coherent strategy, these metrics helped define where knowledge initiatives would be most effective. A 1992 Harvard Business Review article introduced the "balanced scorecard" as a way to communicate strategic plans." [See the Related Information Technology Planning web page with links to articles and websites about the Balanced Scorecard in Performance Measurement].

  Their 1999 year-end article "The KM Year in Review" lists 10 major trends, and suggests that:

  • "1999 was a winning year for knowledge management. ... More importantly, the connection of knowledge to almost every other aspect of business grew more evident, such that the concepts of the knowledge worker, the Knowledge Age and the knowledge economy-if not necessarily of knowledge management-are now widely recognized among the general public."
  • "Intellectual capital, which has long been regarded as an intangible quality of individuals and organizations, is gaining ground as a tangible line item on the corporate balance sheet. The most prominent model has been the balanced scorecard approach, which makes the assumption that 'innovation' and 'learning and growth' predicate future organizational performance. In the past year, various economists and accounting bodies have made progress in developing methodologies to measure the value of organizational knowledge."

  A March, 2000 article "KM Crosses the Chasm" suggests that Knowledge Management is poised to enter the mainstream as senior management recognizes its potential to expand revenues, to help retain talent and expertise and to improve customer service. And an October, 2000 article on customer knowledge management, "Brokering know-how across customer communities increasingly benefits both businesses and the people they sell to," outlines the steps to successful management and use of customer information.

• CIO Magazine, in September 1999 posts an extensive sponsored article "Knowledge Management: Big Challenges, Big Rewards," which discusses preparing for and implementing a Knowledge Management project, with case studies and promotional examples from Finnair, Xerox, AT&T, Hewlett-Packard and Metropolitan Life.
  • "The Eureka system stemmed from the practice of Xerox service workgroups--typically four to seven technicians with joint accountability for a group of customers--gathering at the end of the day to exchange war stories about repair problems and what they had done to solve them. This informal exchange of information was a valuable adjunct to repair manuals, which were difficult to keep current and complete, given the infinite number of problems that could occur."
  • "It took us a while to figure out the right incentive to get [the service technicians] to submit their tips," says Dan Holtshouse, director of business strategy knowledge initiatives for Xerox. "What worked was personal recognition. Their name and the name of the validator goes with the suggestion."
  • "The software "is much more effective than any librarian system, it allows the people working on a project--the folks who intuitively understand which of their colleagues would need or be interested in the knowledge they possess--to share the information quickly and easily."
  • "[Large quantities of documents in enterprise systems require] highly intelligent searching and categorization functions, and this technology, which previously was available only in proprietary KM systems, is now a part of generic software packages. The building blocks of this new generation of KM systems are categorizing (the ability to read a page and work out what it is about), hyperlinking (the ability to read an article and say "also look at this report"), searching in natural language, profiling (the ability to help a company understand what a user is interested in) and alerting [those who need to know]."

• PriceWaterhouseCoopers posts in its Insights and Solutions section, "Easing into Knowledge Management," an article that describes the balance among the three C's: Content, Community and Computing. They also offer definitions of explicit and tacit knowledge, and suggest some steps for getting started.
  • in a knowledge firm, "effectively leveraging their knowledge assets is key to understanding their customers' needs and meeting those needs in innovative ways."
  • "Knowledge management is both a discipline and an art. It's a management discipline insofar as processes can be defined and implemented to capture and tend the knowledge, to make it available to the workers, to keep track of who is contributing to the knowledge arsenal and who is applying it well, and so forth. ... But it's the art part that actually causes KM to work."
  • "We might define the spirit of knowledge management as:
    • Knowing individually what we know collectively and applying it.
    • Knowing collectively what we know individually and making it (re)usable.
    • Knowing what we don't know and learning it."
  • "As knowledge management becomes increasingly imbedded in the culture of an organization, its value soars."

• Paul A. Strassmann posts Measuring and Managing Knowledge Capital (1999; 7 pp), which describes the need to measure and manage knowledge capital in terms of the more familiar financial capital which has been measured and managed traditionally. It is a preview of his forthcoming book "Knowledge Capital" (fall 1999). A couple of excerpts are below.
  • "When the expenses for acquiring information capabilities cease to be an arbitrary budget allocation and become the means for gaining Knowledge Capital, much of what is presently accepted as management of information will have to shift from a largely technological view of efficiency to an asset management perspective."
  • "Analysis of corporate financial statements now shows conclusively that effective information management could have a greater impact on overall corporate performance than efficient financial management."
  • "The two hundred years of the dominance of financial capital in the corporate world is now history. The era of information and knowledge management has arrived. The information age is now a reality, because it can now be planned, budgeted and controlled as a corporate input and not merely as a technology investment."

• Hubert Saint-Onge, VP at Clarica, has posted a page of abstracts linking to his Knowledge Management white papers and articles.

• McMaster University Business School hosts the Institute for Intellectual Capital Research, which includes lists of references, researchers, software, links to related websites, and more.

• Software developer Dataware Technologies (about) posts "Knowledge Management: Linking People to Knowledge for Bottom Line Results." It provides a mainly technology-oriented view, but includes some process aspects too.
• • From the overview in Appendix I: "To begin to manage corporate knowledge, knowledge managers need to first understand how it is transferred within the organization. Individuals are the source of organizational knowledge. For the knowledge to gain value, the organization must provide [both the cultural and technological] mechanisms that capture it and transfer it across the organization."

• Statoil posts in its Statoil Forum a series of articles "Organisational Learning and Competitiveness" that includes an article on "Competence Development and Knowledge Management."

• The Journal On-line posts "Can Web-based Knowledge Sharing Tools Improve the Learning Process in an MBA Consulting Class?" The article, in case study form, points out that "Business and education are both trying to accomplish the same goals - the creation and management of knowledge."
  • "We see that the opportunity now exists for both education and business to collaborate and utilize the same tools to create, contribute and share knowledge."
  • "The repository should act as a knowledge archive where all stakeholders can find relevant information, ... . The accumulation of knowledge can have a profound impact on improvements in productivity as students, clients and faculty learn to share knowledge, eliminating many redundant processes and maximizing the efficiency of everyone's time and efforts. These efficiencies should lead to improvements in productivity by creating synergies in the sharing of knowledge and ideas."
  • "Education can no longer take place in a just a brick and mortar setting. Collaboration with partners-in-learning ... opens doors to education to understand and utilize the tools and practices that are needed to effectively run a business, a program or a project. As we see technology becoming more a part of the fabric of our daily lives, and no longer an obstacle, we can begin to weave and share content into a community of lifelong learners in education, business, organizations, cultural institutions, and the general public. With these knowledge-sharing tools, we all can share and play a part in the growth and success of our educational process."

• The Ernst and Young Center for Business Innovation hosts the Perspectives on Business Innovations Journal, which posts "Choosing Your Spots for Knowledge Management." This well-written article by Peter Novins and Richard Armstrong, exposes several myths about KM, and suggests some remedies.
  • "If you think the decisions that make or break a company are those made by strategists at the top, go back and re-read your Tolstoy. Whether in war or in commerce, it's the sum total of countless decisions made every day on the front lines that determine the course of future events."
  • "Success ... depends on good individual, daily decisions outweighing bad ones over time. ... Partly, this is a question of simply granting the authority for decision-making--and establishing accountability for decisions made. But much more importantly, it's a question of equipping people with the knowledge required to make decisions well."
  • "As managers start to think about making organizations knowledgeable, they look for guidance to the only model they know: making individuals knowledgeable. They make an immediate assumption that organizational knowledge is simply individual knowledge writ large, ... It's not true."
  • Managers often classify and manage knowledge based on what it is about (its domain). "In fact, our work indicates that thinking about knowledge in terms of domains is not very useful at all in guiding knowledge management. Instead, the real insight comes when we look at relative levels of applicability and transferability."
  • In most knowledge transfer alternatives, we think first of one-to-one (tutoring, apprenticeship) or one-to-many (classrooms, articles, presentations). "The real opportunity lies in the realm where individuals and companies are least comfortable--knowledge transfer from many-to-many (forums, discussion groups)."

• The paper also contains some excellent notes on development of a Knowledge Management initiative at Bechtel.

• @Knowledge Magazine posts an introductory article, "What is Knowledge Management?" which includes sections providing definitions, asking why we need knowledge management now, identifying roadblocks, listing a categorization of knowledge management approaches, etc.

• Nua (an Irish consultancy specializing in Internet Surveys) hosts Knowledge News, an annotated index of articles and news in the Knowledge Management field. They also distribute a KM mailing list.

• The white paper "Team Knowledge Management: A Computer-Mediated Approach" (1996; 8 pp), is posted by John Gundry of the Knowledge Ability consultancy, and George Metes. It focuses mainly on knowledge transfers which occur through what people say and do in their day-to-day work. Their Work By Wire website offers additional resources.

• Carl Frappaolo of the Delphi Group consultancy (current articles list; KM articles index; white papers) posts "Knowledge Management: From Terra Incognita to Terra Firma" (1997; 6 pp), and "Harvesting Corporate Knowledge Resources" (March, 2000; 6 pp), among others.

• ComputerWorld posts "Please Don't Call It Knowledge Management," by Rochelle Garner, a series of clips which emphasizes the teaching and learning and the contact information aspects by a group of Knowledge Management practitioners.
  • "It's best not to view knowledge management as a discipline so much as a perspective - a way of viewing situations for promoting the flow of knowledge to the people who need it."
  • "One thing that's emerged ... is we won't turn all that corporate data into some knowledge that's in some 'place.' It doesn't come out of our heads that well. Instead, we are looking at ways to most effectively link people together, to find one another."

• The Journal of Systemic Knowledge Management (about) posts several articles, mainly from 1998 and 1999.

• The Knowledge Research Institute (about) posts a series of Reports and White Papers.

• The Special Libraries Association (about) posts "Selected References on Knowledge Management," not all of which are on-line.

• InternetWeek posts "Lotus: Grand Vision, Tall Order" (Jan 2000; 3pp) which points out that "customers [are] skeptical that Lotus can make knowledge management work". Newer versions of Lotus are not being taken up quickly; and customers are wondering if all this "Knowledge Management" stuff is too complicated. Most are still using Lotus as an e-mail and messaging system, not as a content manager, or an information sharing technology. Links: Lotus KM home, Lotus "About KM" page, and IBM's KM page.

• Ken Goldberg at UC Berkeley is editing "The Robot in the Garden: Telerobotics and Telepistemology on the Internet" for spring 2000 publication. If epistemology is the study of the nature of knowledge, then "this volume explores the extent to which epistemology can inform our understanding of telerobotic technology, and the extent to which telerobotics may furnish new insights into familiar questions about the nature and possibility of knowledge -- questions concerning authenticity, evidence, deception, and agency."
  • "Putting a telerobot on the Internet also introduces the potential for remote agency: the ability to perform physical actions and view the results. The issues of access, authority, and agency are central to what might be labeled telepistemology."
  • "As our reach is extended, we are increasingly vulnerable to error, deception and forgery."

• The above web page lists the confirmed contributors and their topics, including Catherine Wilson in Philosophy at U of A.

• The Leadership Alliance, Inc., hosts the Journal of Knowledge Management Practice, (articles) which "brings together theory and case studies in [Knowledge Management] to provide progressive organisations with an holistic understanding and practical insight."

• The Age of Social Transformation by Peter F. Drucker (a 1994 Atlantic Monthly article; 20 pp) - "A survey of the epoch that began early in this century, and an analysis of its latest manifestations: an economic order in which knowledge, not labor or raw material or capital, is the key resource; a social order in which inequality based on knowledge is a major challenge; and a polity in which government cannot be looked to for solving social and economic problems." A few excerpts from the article may be seen below.
  • "... knowledge workers gain access to jobs and social position through formal education."
  • "Education will become the center of the knowledge society, and the school its key institution. What knowledge must everybody have? What is "quality" in learning and teaching? These will of necessity become central concerns of the knowledge society, and central political issues. In fact, the acquisition and distribution of formal knowledge may come to occupy the place in the politics of the knowledge society which the acquisition and distribution of property and income have occupied in our politics over the two or three centuries that we have come to call the Age of Capitalism."
  • "In the knowledge society, clearly, more and more knowledge, and especially advanced knowledge, will be acquired well past the age of formal schooling and increasingly, perhaps, through educational processes that do not center on the traditional school. But at the same time, the performance of the schools and the basic values of the schools will be of increasing concern to society as a whole, rather than being considered professional matters that can safely be left to 'educators.'"
  • "Traditionally, and especially during the past 300 years, an educated person was somebody who had a prescribed stock of formal knowledge. ... Increasingly, [in the knowledge age] an educated person will be somebody who has learned how to learn, and who continues learning, especially by formal education, throughout his or her lifetime."
  • "Knowledge knows no boundaries. There is no domestic knowledge and no international knowledge. There is only knowledge. And with knowledge becoming the key resource, there is only a world economy, even though the individual organization in its daily activities operates within a national, regional, or even local setting."

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Sources of Related Information

Most of these references are outside the City of Grande Prairie website, and are therefore linked so as to open a new window in your browser. To return here, just close the new window.

• The World Bank's Global Knowledge Program and associated Global Knowledge Partnership seek to aid in the distribution and sharing of knowledge in the countries of the developing world. If a world bank becomes a clearinghouse for global knowledge, could it signal big changes for local or regional banks as clearinghouses of mere financial transactions and related information and services? [See also Davenport articles and case studies above].

• Charles E. Lucier and Janet D. Torsilieri of Booz-Allen and Hamilton have written "Why Knowledge Programs Fail: A CEO's Guide to Managing Learning," which is available as a single .PDF document (11 pp.) or as a series of ten pages in HTML format.
  • "The potential impact [of managing learning] is enormous, not only in terms of immediate business impact but also in long-term competitiveness and organization effectiveness. Top management has four roles to play:
    • Guide the start-up effort by setting initial objectives, program design, scope and financial targets,
    • Set aggressive targets for rapid and dramatic improvements,
    • Change the organization to emphasize the project's importance and align incentives,
    • Exercise stewardship by assuring that progress on the strategic initiative is is rapid as possible, that spending levels are appropriate, and monitoring performance with best-of-breed.

• Jerry Ash of the Association KM Network (a doorway for association executives and staff to seek and share a wealth of knowledge about knowledge management specifically focused on the needs of professional and trade associations; about), posts "A Short Course in Knowledge Management." In about four pages he ably points out the need to manage intellectual assets in a knowledge economy.
  • "when the industrial world awoke to the fact that the worth of their companies depended largely on what they knew in an exploding new knowledge-based economy, the earth moved."
  • "Knowledge [is not in the computers; it] is people-based. It's information that has been processed, analyzed, distilled and packaged by the human mind," he says.
  • "It is estimated that 70 to 80 percent of what our workers know is hidden. We don't know what we know and we don't know who knows it. Can you imagine such a scenario in the Industrial Age?"
  • "In an open, knowledge-based organization, interdepartmental cooperation and collaboration must become an integral part of the daily routine."

• A Knowledge Management Case Study at Microsoft describes how they created "an online competency profile for jobs and employees" within the internal IS unit. The study talks about developing the competency structure, defining the competencies for specific jobs, rating employees on job competencies, linkages to educational resources, etc. The Microsoft Knowledge Management Strategy website posts "Practicing Knowledge Management: Turning Experience and Information into Results," which includes "The Imperative for Knowledge Management," some background and definitions,  "Elements of KM Solutions," and "Organizational Dynamics."

• Another case study, "From Center to Periphery: Shifting Agency in Complex Technical Learning Environments," has been posted by Martin Ryder and Brent Wilson of the University of Colorado at Denver.

• "This paper reports on [a] Collaborative Online Support System (COSS) [which] has been implemented among a team of engineering and support personnel whose job function is to provide advanced helpdesk support for users of complex computer storage peripherals. ... The initial goals of COSS emerged in the context of corporate downsizing, ... The reduction in force ... created a knowledge crisis within the organization. ... As skilled employees left the workplace, they took with them critical technical knowledge accrued in the process of day-to-day engineering problem-solving. ... Maintenance engineers were left in place to support newly released products without having access to the knowledge and experience of those who designed the products."

• John Seely Brown has posted "Mysteries of the Region: Knowledge Dynamics In Silicon Valley." This paper deals with the reasons that firms within industries tend to locate together, geographically. He observes that "Knowledge is hard to acquire in a usable form unless the people who would acquire it engage in the actual activity or practices of which the knowledge is a part. Consequently, it doesn't travel indifferently over digital networks ... as information does. 'Spreading the practice has not been easy.' And spreading practices is the key to spreading actionable knowledge." [See also the other John Seely Brown entry above].

• The European Space Agency (ESA) Publications Division (about) has posted "Corporate Knowledge Management and Related Initiatives at ESA" (1997; 6 pp) which combines a good introductory section describing Knowledge Management with a case study format for describing what they are doing and what their plans are, both internal to the agency and in connection with the national agencies of its members.

• The Center for Knowledge Management at the Galen Digital Library of the University of California at San Francisco deals primarily with dissemination of its health sciences knowledge base.

• Lakewood posts a "White Paper on Knowledge Management," which is presented as a mini E-Learning course, and which is aimed at training and performance improvement professionals. It has helpful definitions, a quick reading pace and the pages load in a flash.

• "Organizational Change and the Digital Economy: A Computational Organization Science Perspective," is posted as a WORD document by Kathleen M. Carey, and contains some interesting perspectives on the interdependencies of social networks (who knows whom), knowledge networks (who knows what) and information networks (what information is related to what other information).

• In the book, "The Social Life of Information," John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid point out that: "The importance of people as creators and carriers of knowledge is forcing organizations to realize that knowledge lies less in its databases than in its people. It's been said, for example, that if NASA wanted to go to the moon again, it would have to start from scratch, having lost not the data, but the human expertise that took it there last time. Similarly, Tom Davenport and Larry Prusak argue that when Ford wanted to build on the success of the Taurus, the company found that the essence of that success had been lost with the loss of the people that created it. Their knowledge was not stored in information technologies. It left when they left." Amazon's listing.

• Community Intelligence Labs, a California consultancy, is the "home of Knowledge Ecology, an interdisciplinary art and science focused on developing, sharing, and applying knowledge not as a thing that can be "managed" but as a human and organizational capability that can be cultivated." They also post a resources page and a FAQ.

• The Conference Board has publications for sale on Knowledge Management, Intellectual Property, Change Management and many other topics.

• Coates and Jarratt Online (a consultancy focused on development of futures scenarios) posts a reprint of a 1995 article, "Looking Ahead: Brain Technology on [the] Way." Author Joseph F. Coates looks at pharmaceuticals and computer-assisted devices which will help us understand the operation of the brain, and may offer alternatives for enhancement of its capabilities, including learning and understanding. Other Articles and Publications in a futurist vein are also posted.

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