Organizations need to know a good deal about themselves in order to operate successfully. Knowledge management asks and answers questions an organization has about its knowledge:

• What do we know?
• Where do we keep it?
• How do we get to it?
• How do we use it?
• What does it mean?
• How does it affect the enterprise?

Knowledge management is the natural outgrowth of several older methods of dealing with information. Organizations originally operated under the belief that it was sufficient to store data and information in large repositories (databases) and to access what was needed to create financial reports. In the 1980s database analysts and researchers began to realize the value of what their organizations knew. In the 1990s that realization developed into the understanding that the most successful organizations were capable ...