It first gained some prominence in the cold war era when studies were commissioned by all of the major potential belligerents to try to identify what characteristics made a good fighter pilot. Second, Situational Awareness is a term only recently, beginning in 2015, used in the context of KM. The logical conclusion, then, is to attempt to apply those same successful environmental aspects to knowledge workers at large, and that is precisely what KM attempts to do. The salient aspect that emerges with overwhelming importance is that of rich, deep, and open communications, not only within the firm, but also with the outside world. The research domain, and in particular the pharmaceutical industry, has been studied in depth with a focus on identifying the organizational and cultural environmental aspects that lead to successful research (Koenig, 1990, 1992). Peter Drucker once commented that the product of the pharmaceutical industry wasn’t pills, it was information. ![]() Furthermore, the researcher is, after all, the quintessential information worker. It is almost trite now to observe that we are in the post-industrial information age and that we are all information workers. What is KM trying to accomplish? Rich, Deep, and Open Communicationįirst, KM can very fruitfully be seen as the undertaking to replicate, indeed to create, the information environment known to be conducive to successful R&D-rich, deep, and open communication and information access-and to deploy it broadly across the firm. The timing was propitious, as the enthusiasm for intellectual capital (see below) in the 1980s, had primed the pump for the recognition of information and knowledge as essential assets for any organization. Those consulting organizations quickly disseminated the principles and the techniques of KM to other organizations, to professional associations, and to disciplines. Note that Davenport was at E&Y when he wrote the definition above. KM went public, as it were, at a conference in Boston in 1993 organized by Ernst and Young (Prusak 1999). The term apparently was first used in its current context at McKinsey in 1987 for an internal study on their information handling and utilization (McInerney and Koenig, 2011). ![]() However, a new product needs a name, and the name that emerged was Knowledge Management. Not surprisingly, they quickly realized that in building tools and techniques such as dashboards, expertise locators, and best practice (lessons learned) databases, they had acquired an expertise which was in effect a new product that they could market to other organizations, particularly to organizations which were large, complex, and dispersed. When the Internet arose, those organizations quickly realized that an intranet, an in-house subset of the Internet, was a wonderful tool with which to make information accessible and to share it among the geographically dispersed units of their organizations. The concept and the terminology of KM sprouted within the management consulting community. Later in this article, its stages of development will also be recapped. However, Knowledge Management can best and most quickly be explained by recapping its origins. The classic one-line definition of Knowledge Management was offered up by Tom Davenport early on (Davenport, 1994): “Knowledge Management is the process of capturing, distributing, and effectively using knowledge.” Probably no better or more succinct single-line definition has appeared since. What is KM? Knowledge Management Explained
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