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Introduction to Knowledge Management 17

Knowledge Emergence Your Company’s
Creating of virtual Most Valuable
Company organizations Asset:
HBR Nonaka Intellectual
Capital
Certification
Stewart
Organizational Measurement Community of knowledge
Learning of intellectual of Practice innovation
ARPANET Sloan Mgmt. assets Brown standards
1969 1985 1988 1991 1994 1997 2000 +
Proliferation Fifth Knowledge The Balanced First KM
of information Discipline Management Scorecard programs in
technology Senge Foundations Kaplan and Norton universities
Wiig
First CKO APQC
Edvinsson benchmarking
Corporation
Figure 1.3
A summary timeline of knowledge management

Senge, Ikujiro Nonaka, Hirotaka Takeuchi, and Thomas Stewart. An extract of this
timeline is shown in fi gure 1.3 .
The various eras we have lived through offer another perspective on the history of
KM. Starting with the industrial era in the 1800s, we focused on transportation tech-
nologies in 1850, communications in 1900, computerization beginning in the 1950s,
and virtualization in the early 1980s, and early efforts at personalization and profi ling
technologies beginning in the year 2000 ( Deloitte, Touche, Tohmatsu 1999 ). Figure
1.4 summarizes these developmental phases.
With the advent of the information or computer age, KM has come to mean the
systematic, deliberate leveraging of knowledge assets. Technologies enable valuable
knowledge to be remembered , via organizational learning and corporate memory; as
well as enabling valuable knowledge to be published , that is, widely disseminated to
all stakeholders. The evolution of knowledge management has occurred in parallel
with a shift from a retail model based on a catalog (e.g., Ford ’ s famous quote that you
can have a car in any color you like — as long as it is black) to an auction model (as
exemplifi ed by eBay) to a personalization model where real-time matching of user
needs and services occur in a win-win exchange model.
In 1969, the launch of the ARPANET allowed scientists and researchers to com-
municate more easily with one another in addition to being able to exchange large
data sets they were working on. They came up with a network protocol or language
that would allow disparate computers and operating systems to network together