The New Edge in Knowledge: How Knowledge Management Is Changing the Way We Do Business

The main theoretical wager in this book is that knowledge management is not what it used to be. It is time to reinvent the basic principles of knowledge management and deploy them to harness knowledge more effectively in organizations. Dell and Hubert attempt to provide the basic set of ideas to make this possible. It would not be fair to merely describe this as an’ attempt’ given that this book is endorsed by none less than Larry Prusak, the founder of the Institute for Knowledge Management. Prusak formalizes the new principles with which this book works at the very outset when he points out that knowledge management must henceforth be understood in the language of ‘flow’, as ‘primarily a human activity’, and, as ‘profoundly social’. What these three principles have in common is the fact that knowledge is not being collected as an end in itself but with the needs of the business in mind. This is because much of the knowledge that is collected remains ‘unused’ or becomes ‘unusable’ due to errors in how it is classified, stored, and retrieved. Furthermore, it is important to ensure that the cost factors in knowledge management are clearly understood. It is not cost effective to avoid knowledge management, but at the same time, inadequate protocols of knowledge management will cost more than not having a knowledge management system at all. The idea here is not be merely dazzled by the technological availability of a system, but think of ‘business outcomes’ rather than the structure of knowledge management per se. It is only insofar as the outcomes enable more effective business results that it will become possible to justify the cost-factors involved in setting up, maintaining, and deploying a knowledge management architecture in the firm or in an organization. While this may seem but a matter of common sense, it is often the case that the strategic rationale is forgotten when a knowledge management system is set up. And, again, it is important to ensure that the system has an effective alignment with the strategic goals of the business enterprise. Most of these systems start off well, but fall into disuse since the ‘retrieval mechanisms’ are not thought through properly. In the absence of effective retrieval systems, the relevant piece of knowledge even when available will remain unutilized or underutilized.