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have taken this evolution to a new level, as the use of blogs and wikis allows for semistructured
approaches to creating, storing, and distributing knowledge.
KM applications can be very elaborate and well structured; they can become part of the corporate
culture and part of the corporate work process. Or KM applications can be the very opposite.
Organizations have to let the grassroots efforts flourish while the organization begins to understand
what knowledge needs to be managed and how it can best be managed.
Managing IT Resources
When all processing was done by one machine in one room with one operating system and run by
professional technologists, managing the IT resources focused on maintaining that one machine and its
peripherals, monitoring the air-conditioning of the “glass house” and making sure that the access
system worked. Today, the IT organization within a firm has lots of machines of all sizes, lots of data
to maintain and make available, lots of software, lots of connection nodes and firewalls, and lots of
end users, not all of whom are technology-savvy, and some aren‟t even employees! Being held
accountable by the end user—the person who is actually using the product offered by the IT
organization—for many organizations was a new phenomenon.
Hardware
Most of the early computers were large, mainframe computers. Usually manufactured by IBM, they
were powerful batch processing machines. Large numbers of documents (e.g., invoices or orders)
were entered into the computer and then processed, producing various reports and special documents,
such as accounts receivable aging statements.
In many companies, millions of lines of software were written to run on this mainframe technology.
Generally, these machines were programmed in a language called COBOL and used an operating
system that was proprietary for that hardware. The same program wouldn‟t necessarily run on
computers from different manufacturers. Because there were slight differences in configurations and
operating systems, it was even difficult to run the same software on different computers that were
produced by the same manufacturer.
In the 1980s, technology evolved from proprietary operating systems to minicomputers with open
operating systems. The first open operating systems were computers that used the UNIX operating
system. Although in the 1970s Bell Labs actually developed UNIX as an operating system for
scientific applications, it later became an accepted standard for commercial applications. The
platform‟s independent operating system and its associated applications could run on a variety of
manufacturers‟ computers, creating opportunities both for companies and for competition within the
computer industry. Organizations were no longer inexorably tied to one manufacturer. UNIX became
the standard in the early 1990s. However, standards changed rapidly, and UNIX lost ground due to the
development of client-server technology. However, as organizations are now shifting toward Webbased
applications, UNIX and its derivative, Linux, are becoming the operating systems of choice for
servers as well as client machines.