The State of the Notion: Knowledge Mangement in Practice

MMIM 503 - Week 2 - Class 2

Ruggles, R. (1998). The state of the notion: Knowledge management in practice. California Management Review, 40(3), 80-89.


Summary:
The article looks at the results of a 1997 study of U.S. and European organizations and their approaches to Knowledge Management. The study examines Knowledge Management in these organizations from three perspectives: What is being done now to manage knowledge; what could or should be done; and what are the greatest barriers to their KM efforts.
Taking a process-based view of organizational management, the authors of the study apply this perspective to the management of knowledge, and develop eight categories of knowledge focused activities (knowledge processes).

The study reveals that in attempting to improve performance in one or more of these processes, organizations have embarked on a variety of KM projects. The four most popular projects are taken as representative of the current state of the practice in KM: Creating an Intranet; Data Warehousing/Creating Knowledge Repositories; Implementing Decision-Support Tools; and Implementing Groupware to Support Collaboration.

In terms of what could/should be done by organizations, the study finds the following three initiatives to be the most popular on the “to do” list: Mapping sources of internal expertise; creating networks of knowledge workers; and establishing new knowledge roles.

The authors of the study identify the balance of 50/25/25 people/process/technology from the outset as crucial to the success or failure of new KM initiatives.

Review:
This 1997 study shows its age now in terms of some of the KM projects which were priorities at the time – creating an intranet for example. However, the process-based view of KM, and the eight categories of processes identified provide a useful framework for the analysis of KM within an organization.