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Future Challenges for KM 441

Table 13.1
Summary of KM cornerstones

1. Steady and pervasive growth — into almost every business function and geographic
location
2. The holistic perspective of people, processes, and technology — as many organizations
still fi nd out to their cost — you cannot simply put in KM technical solutions and leave
the realization of business benefi ts to chance
3. The knowledge cycle — from creation to identifying, gathering, classifying, storing,
accessing, exploiting, and protecting (and many activities in between)
4. Conducting of information audits and development of knowledge maps
5. The classifi cation of intellectual capital into customer capital, structural
(organizational) capital, and human
6. The need for KM to demonstrate its value to the organization ’ s bottom line
7. Communities of practice and the importance of nurturing and not trying to manage
or control them
8. The Internet as an infrastructure for communication, collaboration, and information
sharing
9. The need to root knowledge into its environment and context

ioral change at the individual level and cultural change at the organizational level are
two very diffi cult and lengthy processes. The KM “ quick fi x ” was therefore vastly
misleading.
The return on KM investments should not be exclusively perceived as short-term
gains but long-term process of people and organizationalimprovements. Unfortu-
nately, people only change their behavior when there is an overwhelmingly compel-
ling argument to do so (not the “ leap of faith ” on which much of KM was predicated),
or where there is simply no alternative. Skyrme (2002) , for example, discusses some
of the cornerstones of KM as summarized in table 13.1 .
Before KM, the way in which people shared knowledge was person-to-person, just
in time, and in the context of solving a specifi c business problem. With the ever-
increasing widespread adoption of KM, knowledge management processes such as
knowledge creation/capture, knowledge sharing/dissemination and knowledge acqui-
sition/application begin to form part and parcel of the how organizations conduct
their core business and how knowledge workers go about conducting their work activi-
ties in an effi cient and effective manner.
Another way of looking at what lies ahead for KM is to inventory the types of
research that are being conducted on KM issues.