Relevant resources; Knowledge Management

Knowledge management is the range of practices used by organisations to identify, create, represent, and distribute knowledge. With today's interconnected and social technologies, new possibilities have emerged for doing that. On the other hand, there are different criteria that apply to these practices.

A good introduction to Knowledge Management and the role of technology can be found here. On the website, many more interesting resources about KM can be found as well.

This article shows the problem with Knowledge Management, describes how much of the existing knowledge cannot be found, and therefore cannot be used. Knowledge workers are most of the time busy with re-creating information that already exists. The purpose of Peers is to embed the technology in standard (knowledge creating) processes, and thus making available the information produced by knowledge workers for anyone, and connecting people with people in specific contexts.

The Long Tail is an economic trend resulting from the interconnected and digital properties of today's economy. Chris Anderson (Wired) recognized and studied this phenomenon, and wrote this famous article, in which he explains the phenomenon. The Long Tail is a term to describe the economic potential of niches. In an interconnected world, niches of knowledge (people/documents) may be found and accessed, whereas in previous ages, these resources could not be found. With Peers, people and documents may be found, even when the actual content of documents remains behind a firewall.

Interesting results of a research on KM by Haas and Hansen called "Different knowledge, different benefits: toward a productivity perspective on knowledge sharing in organizations".

This article by Dave Snowden explains the concept of Knowledge Management from the JIT, or Just-In-Time perspective.

Finally, if you are interested in a more philosophical approach toward Knowledge Management, read this article by Ard Huizing, which explains how KM is rooted in the philosophical tradition of objectivism, why this needs to be supplemented with more subjectivist theories.