Knowledge management: the modus operandi for a learning organization

It has been suggested that the labour production factor is being replaced by the knowledge production factor in the West and in Japan. Knowledge is a person's capacity to carry out a particular task well. Knowledge capacity is thought to be composed of information, experiences, skills and attitude. The product of that capacity can be a combination of deterministic, stochastic or heuristic assertions, causal associations, intuition, predictions and decisions which are relevant to the task at hand. Leaming is considered to be the production process by which knowledge is generated. Corresponding managementproblems arise because the competitive resource knowledge is not owned by the corporation for it is captured in the heads of autonomous professionals and therefore hardly controllable in the way traditional production factors such as raw materials, capital and labour are controlled. Knowledge management - i.e. increasing the yield of learning processes in the knowledge value chain - is thus important in organizations in which the collection of knowledge workers has a dominant position. Such organizations are referred to as knowledge-intensive organizations. Some tools intended to improve the mastering of the intangible asset knowledge in those organizations, are presented.