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184 Chapter 6

5. List the different knowledge support technologies that can help users put knowl-
edge into action.

Introduction

KM typically addresses one of two general objectives: knowledge reuse to promote
effi ciency and innovation to introduce more effective ways of doing things. Knowl-
edge application refers to the actual use of knowledge that has been captured or created
and put into the KM cycle (refer to fi gure 6.1 ).
Knowledge eventually is made accessible to all the knowledge workers in the orga-
nization, with an implicit assumption that the knowledge will be used. This turns out
to be a rather large and often unfounded assumption. In fact, if we recall the Nonaka
and Takeuchi model from chapter 3, we can see that having captured, coded, reorga-
nized, and made available, we are still only in the third quadrant. The knowledge
spiral needs to be completed by successful internalization of knowledge. This process
of internalization, it should be recalled, consists not only of accessing and understand-
ing the content but of consciously deciding that this is indeed a good — ideally better —
way of doing things and hence the knowledge is applied to a real world decision or
problem.
This is knowledge reuse, the process whereby useful nuggets of knowledge or knowl-
edge objects are made available in a library of such objects. These knowledge objects

Assess

Knowledge capture Knowledge sharing
and/or creation and dissemination

Contextualize

Knowledge acquisition
and application
Update
Figure 6.1
An integrated KM cycle