Knowledge Management Systems

The Multidimensional Nature of Knowledge

Whereas in the past, knowledge was mostly associated with religion (divine knowledge, sacred scripts), institutions of higher learning (e.g., universities or colleges), research (e.g., laboratories, think tanks), intelligence services (e.g., National Intelligence Council in the United States), or vocational training and essentially seen more as a collective proposition, knowledge has become more proprietary and its management has become an alleged source of organizational success. Business firms, in particular, have placed a premium to broaden their knowledge base and to devise effective strategies for utilizing it. Today, KMSs are part of governmental and nongovernmental, academic and nonacademic institutions alike.

Yet, knowledge is neither the product of cognition nor study alone but instead “a fluid mix of framed experience, values, contextual information, and expert insight that provides a framework for evaluating and incorporating new experiences and information” (Davenport & Prusak, 1998, p. 5). Knowledge originates in “knowers,” thus leaving us with two dimensions by which to classify knowledge: First, we distinguish between individual and collective knowledge. The latter can take [Page 1002]multiple forms depending on its outer boundary, such as unit knowledge, organizational knowledge, “community of practice” knowledge, or common knowledge. The second distinction rests on Michael Polanyi's seminal difference between tacit and explicit knowledge, which has been advanced and popularized by Ikujiro Nonaka (1991). Whereas explicit knowledge is recorded and documented, tacit knowledge consists of individuals’ highly personal and thus subjective insights based on experience and intuition. Tacit knowledge, therefore, is hard to formalize and difficult to communicate.

Figure 1 Functions of knowledge management systems.

Functions of Knowledge Management Systems

The aim of KMSs is to tap into the individual knowledge of an organization's members or users and to enable access to this knowledge throughout the organization or network in order to increase its “organizational memory” (Walsh & Ungson, 1991).

Figure 1 shows the functions of knowledge management systems. The first function lies in the storage of knowledge via, for example, leaflets, manuals, codified procedure rules, reports, electronic databases, wikis, or the creation of knowledge or expert centers instructed to acquire, collect, codify, archive, systematize, and compartmentalize such knowledge. This is a rather straightforward task when it comes to explicit knowledge but far less so regarding tacit knowledge. One way of retaining tacit knowledge in a systematic way is to translate it into explicit knowledge.

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