Page 33 -

16 Chapter 1

intellectual capital approach to KM: selected, well-organized, and widely vetted
content that is maintained, kept up to date, and, above all, put to use to generate
value to users, the users ’ community, and their organization.
What Wells envisioned for the entire world can easily be applied within an orga-
nization in the form of an intranet. What is new and termed knowledge management
is that we are now able to simulate rich, interactive, face-to-face knowledge encoun-
ters virtually through the use of new communication technologies. Information tech-
nologies such as an intranet and the Internet enable us to knit together the intellectual
assets of an organization and organize and manage this content through the lenses
of common interest, common language, and conscious cooperation. We are able to
extend the depth and breadth or reach of knowledge capture, sharing and dissemina-
tion activities, as we had not been able to do before and fi nd ourselves one step
closer to Wells ’ (1938) “ perpetual digest . . . and a system of publication and distri-
bution ” (pp. 70 – 71) “ to an intellectual unifi cation . . . of human memory ” (pp.
86 – 87).
Drucker was the fi rst to coin the term knowledge worker in the early 1960s ( Drucker
1964 ). Senge (1990) focused on the learning organization as one that can learn from
past experiences stored in corporate memory systems. Dorothy Barton-Leonard (1995)
documented the case of Chapparal Steel as a knowledge management success story.
Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995) studied how knowledge is produced, used, and diffused
within organizations and how this contributes to the diffusion of innovation.
The growing importance of organizational knowledge as a competitive asset was
recognized by a number of people who saw the value in being able to measure intel-
lectual assets (see Kaplan and Norton; APQC 1996 ; Edvinsson and Malone 1997,
among others). A cross-industry benchmarking study was led by APQC ’ s president
Carla O ’ Dell and completed in 1996. It focused on the following KM needs:
• Knowledge management as a business strategy
• Transfer of knowledge and best practices
• Customer-focused knowledge
• Personal responsibility for knowledge
• Intellectual asset management
• Innovation and knowledge creation ( APQC 1996 )
The Entovation timeline (available at http://www.entovation.com/timeline/
timeline.htm) identifi es a variety of disciplines and domains that have blended
together to emerge as knowledge management. A number of management theorists
have contributed signifi cantly to the evolution of KM such as Peter Drucker, Peter