Posted by Denham on April 21, 2000 at 11:58:45:

In Reply to: Is Knowledge management and ecommerce two sides of a coin? posted by Bjarne Rugelsjøen on April 19, 2000 at 04:51:07:

Hi Bjarne,

Perhaps it is inevitable that KM will become integrated as the business world adopts the principles and technologies become commodities that you can bolt on existing core applications.

Similarities & overlaps:
1) CRM: both KM and E-business have a vested interested in relationships. KM because relationships are the primary pathways for knowledge flows and E-business because relationships present an opportunity for building trust, loyalty, cross and up-selling and having a 'stickiness' around your web site.
2) Connections: KM is about building connections to enhance the flow of ideas, improve business intelligence, open communications, enhance innovation and learning, hence the focus on yellowpages, interest profiles, information push and connecting people with like interests. e-Business is interested in viral marketing, integration of community & commercial transactions. The focus here is on recommender systems and collaborative systems to sell more things.
3) Adaption & learning: KM is about awareness and continuous learning and building intellectual assets. E-business is about agility and responsiveness to market shifts, personalization, and capture of web psychographics.
4) Data & text mining: KM is interested in the discovery of interesting relationships and new insights with market potential. e-Business uses these technologies to segment web behavior, discover clusters and correlations that help realtime testing of web design and marketing projects and detect 'drift' in customer preferences.
5) Exchanges: KM is concerned with dialog, ideas, opinion verification and insight sharing (knowledge exchanges). e-business is around value exchange, satisfaction of consumer needs and convenience. In both cases there are concerns around evaluation . lowering transaction costs, fostering diversity and enabling wider choice.

Differences:
1) e-business is about faster, better, cheaper, convenience, wider selection. KM is about learning, creating new insights, sharing views and surfacing assumptions, making distinctions and increasing awareness.
2) e-business is about competition, profit, efficiency, speed, ease of use, i.e. process. KM is about increasing competitive position through pervasive learning, improved innovation, better recall, reduced re-invention, a different focus i.e. practice
3) e-business is concerned with new channels, disintermediation of supply chains and crafting new offerings. KM is concerned with double-loop learning, accelating learning, capturing best practices and lessons learned, a focus on group cognition, situated learning and intangible assets.

It seems there are faster returns, easier ways to justify & measure, more immediate opportunity, greater competitive pressure and more visibility in e-business right now. This does not mean KM is not necessary, that it will go away, that e-business is a subsitute for KM. What we have here is more akin to a diversion, yes companies have moved KM resources into e-business, but once they have mastered the technology and understand the electronic side of their business, they will have to return to the harder problems associated with KM i.e. strategic competition via innovation, creating new knowledge-based products and services, husbanding intangible assets, bringing intellectual property to market. KM may be on the sideline once again, much as it was during Y2K, but no company can escape the inevitable pressure to innovate, create new knowledge, employ smart people and learn. KM will return, stronger than before with insights from the e-business diversion and occupy center stage - until the next 'urgent' fad appears.

• KM in e-business

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