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452 Part Three Key System Applications for the Digital Age

the top of the graphic and organizational and management activities below. One
apt slogan of the knowledge management field is, “Effective knowledge manage-
ment is 80 percent managerial and organizational, and 20 percent technology.”
In Chapter 1, we define organizational and management capital as the set of
business processes, culture, and behavior required to obtain value from invest-
ments in information systems. In the case of knowledge management, as with
other information systems investments, supportive values, structures, and
behavior patterns must be built to maximize the return on investment in knowl-
edge management projects. In Figure 11.1, the management and organizational
activities in the lower half of the diagram represent the investment in organiza-
tional capital required to obtain substantial returns on the information technol-
ogy (IT) investments and systems shown in the top half of the diagram.
Knowledge Acquisition
Organizations acquire knowledge in a number of ways, depending on the type
of knowledge they seek. The first knowledge management systems sought
to build corporate repositories of documents, reports, presentations, and best
practices. These efforts have been extended to include unstructured documents
(such as e-mail). In other cases, organizations acquire knowledge by developing
online expert networks so that employees can “find the expert” in the company
who is personally knowledgeable.
In still other cases, firms must create new knowledge by discovering pat-
terns in corporate data or by using knowledge workstations where engineers
can discover new knowledge. These various efforts are described throughout
this chapter. A coherent and organized knowledge system also requires system-
atic data from the firm’s transaction processing systems that track sales, pay-
ments, inventory, customers, and other vital data, as well as data from external
sources such as news feeds, industry reports, legal opinions, scientific research,
and government statistics.

Knowledge Storage
Once they are discovered, documents, patterns, and expert rules must be stored
so they can be retrieved and used by employees. Knowledge storage gener-
ally involves the creation of a database. Document management systems that
digitize, index, and tag documents according to a coherent framework are large
databases adept at storing collections of documents. Expert systems also help
corporations preserve the knowledge that is acquired by incorporating that
knowledge into organizational processes and culture. Each of these is discussed
later in this chapter and in the following chapter.
Management must support the development of planned knowledge storage
systems, encourage the development of corporate-wide schemas for indexing
documents, and reward employees for taking the time to update and store doc-
uments properly. For instance, it would reward the sales force for submitting
names of prospects to a shared corporate database of prospects where all sales
personnel can identify each prospect and review the stored knowledge.

Knowledge Dissemination
Portals, e-mail, instant messaging, wikis, social business tools, and search
engines technology have added to an existing array of collaboration tools for
sharing calendars, documents, data, and graphics (see Chapter 2). Contemporary
technology seems to have created a deluge of information and knowledge. How
can managers and employees discover, in a sea of information and knowledge,
that which is really important for their decisions and their work? Here, training

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