From Knowledge Engineering to Knowledge Management1

The concept of knowledge management has undoubtedly become a major force in business thinking in recent years. Many large organizations are embracing knowledge management and claiming significant benefits. Books such as Working Knowledge (Davenport and Prusak, 1998) and The Knowledge-Creating Company (Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995) demonstrate with multiple examples that many of the world’s most successful organizations are those that are best at managing their knowledge. Organizations use a number of methods and software tools to support knowledge management. Most of these tools, however, have been developed as part of an unstructured technological thrust: they are more concerned with new ways of storing and communicating information than with the actual ways in which people create, acquire and use knowledge. Lotus Notes and the world wide web are examples of these types of technologies. While we do not deny the importance of such tools, we believe that new methods and tools are needed that can supplement existing technologies, but that are specifically oriented towards knowledge. Such methods and tools would act as a bridge between people and current technologies. They would improve support for key activities such as knowledge creation, knowledge mapping, knowledge retrieval and knowledge use. Our central thesis is that there are methods and tools, developed in the field of artificial intelligence, that can (and should) provide such a technology. This does not mean, however, that we believe managers should fill their companies with intelligent systems such as expert systems, neural networks and case-based reasoning systems. Instead, British Journal of Management, Vol. 10, 309–322 (1999)