Posted by riva gianluca on November 30, 2001 at 13:02:57:

In Reply to: KM Strategy - Four Key orientation posted by Bill on November 29, 2001 at 16:54:20:

Hi Bill, I've been studying knowledge management since last March at my University, and I can say the question is a little more complicated. tHere's plenty of articles concerning the topics, but most is just meaningless, useless, confusing or hust faddish. If you try a research on the Net you're overwhelmed by thousands of strange software-stuff...Actually the fields of KM are much more than four: for example I can suggest to you to read the piece by Earl M.J. "KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT STRATEGIES: TOWARD A TAXONOMY". You can find it in THE JOURNAL OF MANAGEMENT INFORMATION SYSTEMS, Summer 2001 VOL:18 N.1 pp.215-233, or in the Database ABI/INFORM as well. Anyway, I can help you by saying that he identified seven hot topics:
1)"Systems school" which tries to codify knowledge (Databases, Expert Systems and so on. To be honest, they are not very successful so far)
2)"Maps school", which tries to map knowledge or the knowers (yellow pages). Yellow pages report the previous experience and assignements of the experts, but they are often outdated
3) "Process school", which strain for improving business processes with the storage and transfer best practices. The problem is that the concept of best practice is ambiguous: how much is a so-called best practice context and people-dependent?
4)"Trading school", whose aim is an aggressive management of intellectual property, such as patents...
5)"Organizational school", based on the concepts of social networks. The key idea is that knowledge is social, and regards interactions between experienced people and pupils or between different bodies of knowledge
6)"Spatial school", founded on the idea to change the work spaces (open spaces and stuff like that)
7)"Strategical school", chiefly based on RBV (Resouce based view of the firm), which tries to change the way we look at the concept of the firm, in light of the (so-called) knowledge age

If this is not enough, there's also a good article by Harvard Business Review ("What's your strategy for managing knowledge?"), Vol.77 March/April 1999 pp.106-116 talking about two different types of strategy: codification and personalization. Codification (Databases and best practices, like Accenture, Ernst & Young, Dell) would be suitable when your product is commodified, whereas personalization (HP, McKInsey) relies on social networks and would be perfect when your produvt is something adapted at the needs of a specific customer, or whe creativity is at the heart of your firm's business.
If you'd like to look at the neglected dimension of human resource practices which can make trust and leraning thrive why don't you read one of several articles by the great Pfeffe? (One for all, "seven practices of successful organizations", California Management Review, Vol.40 n.2 Winter 1998, pp.83-108)

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