Page 460 -

Future Challenges for KM 443

ate such issues. Similarly, understanding better how to socialize knowledge through
techniques such as storytelling and scenarios will offer organizations greater mastery
and scope in creating, sharing, and reusing the knowledge that is critical to survival
in the twenty-fi rst century.
Others, such as Bouthillier and Shearer (2002) undertook survey research to inves-
tigate whether KM is an emerging discipline or just a new label for information man-
agement (IM). The authors gathered empirical evidence of how KM is practiced in
several types of organizations demonstrating the variety of organizational approaches
that are used and the processes that are involved. Based on an exploratory study of
KM practices, they presents a typology of methodologies that are employed in various
organizations to illustrate what may be considered as the particular nature of KM to
show potential differences with IM.
The fi eld of knowledge management is fairly new. This explains why its research
base is still under development. Despite the vagueness of KM, its potential overlaps
with IM, and its weak theoretical base, KM is practiced in many organizations. Exam-
ining empirical evidence is certainly a valid approach for identifying building blocks
of theories and concepts to support the development of new scientifi c fi elds. Indeed,
scientifi c knowledge is often rooted in practice: culture and society existed before we
had anthropology and sociology. The empirical evidence that was gathered for this
study shows that KM involves human/soft and technical/hard aspects (Hlupic,
Pouloudi, and Rzevski, 2002). KM seems to be made of various organizational practices
requiring changes in policies, work routines, and organizational structures. More spe-
cifi cally, these authors found the following general principles:
• Knowledge, in practice, is most often defi ned as tacit knowledge in spite of the
conceptual problems mentioned above. Explicit knowledge was included only in those
initiatives where the focus was converting tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge.
• Knowledge management, as it is practiced, really means facilitating the sharing of
tacit knowledge. Despite the fact that other processes were part of the KM projects,
sharing was the primary emphasis of all case studies.
• There are slight differences in the practices between private and public sector knowl-
edge management. Private sector organizations use KM for internal knowledge sharing
targeted in specifi c areas of the organization. The KM initiatives are most often con-
cerned with managing business and administrative knowledge. Public sector organiza-
tions use KM for both internal and external knowledge sharing throughout the
organization and the KM initiatives are most often concerned with managing product-
related knowledge.