Posted by Riva Gianluca on December 04, 2001 at 12:08:43:

In Reply to: History of Knowledge Management posted by Leigh on November 18, 2001 at 11:20:35:

Hi Leigh, I've been studying knowledge management for several months, since it's the topic of my thesis. yes, I have my version of knowledge management's history. If you think of the management of knowledge its history is as old as the hills. The romans, Henry Ford and so on were managing knowledge. If we think about the knowledge management movement, it's not a unified fild. There exist at least two differents fields:
1) Intellectual capital movement, which basically tries to evaluate and measure knowledge and intellectual activities of a firm. It dates back to Sveiby's work at the Swesish insurance company Skandia, with the famous Navigator (1995). In 1997 Sveiby, Edivinsson and Stewart (now Fortune's editor) published three books about intellectual capital, therefore 1997 is the official foundation year for the movement. So far many indices have been proposed. They argue the traditional balance sheet is not effective at measusring the real value of a company, and we could find a demonstration in the difference between the "book evaluation" and the market value. I agree balance sheet is not perfect at all, but I do strongly believe the difference between market value and book value is too inaccurate to measure intellectual capital
2)The real Knowledge Management movement broke out after the publishing of Nonaka's book "The knowledge creating company". After it's been an authentic explosion of conferences, sites, boks, softwarehouses and so on and so forth...The results so far have been a little too disappointing. Just now somenody is changing the topic (for example Prusak) adding the missing concept of social capital, claiming we need more social interaction and trust to make knowledge sharing thrive. The same critic is beared by Wenger, who introduced the concept of Community of Practice (a group of experts who share a passion for a specific issue). The concepts of Wenger have been misunderstood as well, since he said they are spontanous and not engineered, and the problem is to connect Communities, rather than just trying engineering them. There's also the valuable attempt to link knowledge management to the old organizational learning thinking.
Bye for now. If that it's not enough, I will be delighted to share my point of view with you

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Follow Ups:

• Re: History of Knowledge Management vinayak gadgil 13:05:41 01/11/02 (1)
  • History of Knowledge Management Riva Gianluca 04:43:06 01/12/02 (0)

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