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and systematic management of vital knowledge – and its
associated processes of creation, organization, diffusion, use and
exploitation’. This identifies some critical aspects of any successful
knowledge management programme:
� Explicit – surfacing assumptions, codifying that which is
known.
� Systematic – leaving things to serendipity will not achieve the
benefits.
� Vital – you need to focus; no-one has unlimited resources.
� Processes – knowledge management is a set of activities with
its own tools and techniques.
It is important to note that knowledge encompasses both tacit
knowledge (in people’s heads) and explicit knowledge (codified
and expressed as knowledge in databases, etc.) and the
programme will address the processes of development and
management of both these basic forms.
To address knowledge management issues, we need to ask
questions about: ‘Who knows about what? Who needs to know?
How important is it to us to get it right? What do we stand to
lose if we get it wrong?’ and so on. The goal of a knowledge
management strategy should be to understand that there are
communities and groupings that share a pool of knowledge, and
to understand how the processes and channels for pooling this
knowledge operate. We then need to look around for the right
tools (often ICT tools) to facilitate the capture, transfer and use
of knowledge about all aspects of the business.
This process of knowledge capture and use takes place at the
level of the individual networks of knowledge within the
organization and community networks. This can be described
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;
Knowledge management is both a discipline and an art. There
are techniques that can be defined, taught, learned, replicated,
customized and applied to yield predictable outcomes, but it’s
the art part that counts. Emphasis on the human nature of
knowledge creation has moved knowledge management away
from its early technology-centred interpretation towards a view