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knowledge is made widely available as a shared organizational resource. Work
practices are therefore concerned largely with connecting individuals, projects
and organizations and significant emphasis is placed on codifying and sharing
knowledge across teams and projects, often through the medium of ICTs. These
processes are particularly important in large knowledge-intensive organizations
where standardized processes are used across the organization in order to sustain
high levels of efficiency, for example in the pharmaceutical sector, or where there
is a significant amount of repeat business and relatively standardized solutions
are developed for clients and customers, for example in global consulting firms.
The BankCo case in Chapter 7 and the discussion across Chapters 4, 5 and 8
have all highlighted, however, that codified knowledge is to all intents and pur-
poses inert and meaningless divorced from context. Investments in KMS that
operate purely as repositories for knowledge are therefore unwise. If organiza-
tions adopt this limited view of what managing knowledge is, then the KMS will
be quickly viewed as a poor investment and fail.
Nowadays with the advent of Web 2.0 technologies, active collaboration via
codified, visual and oral means across continents has been massively enhanced
and many large organizations are now exploiting these technologies to encour-
age (virtual) networking and the sharing of knowledge more broadly in order to
radically innovate. Effective team- and project-based working in these commu-
nity contexts relies on work practices centred on community building and social
networking within and across dispersed business units and organizations. These
practices are vital in order for a shared identity, shared perspectives and trust to
develop which will promote the effective sharing and integration of knowledge
which promotes innovation – particularly radical innovation. In these organiza-
tional contexts then both knowledge exploration and exploitation are afforded
equal strategic significance.
Finally there are organizations, both large and small, which are yet to realize the
strategic significance of knowledge for competitive advantage, and in those orga-
nizations that choose not to actively manage knowledge, the status quo prevails.

>> KNOWLEDGE PROCESSES AND ENABLING CONTEXT

In the following section the most pertinent aspects of each of the four major knowl-
edge processes are discussed with reference to previous chapters and cases. The
emphasis throughout this book has been on the process and practice perspectives
of managing knowledge work. Both these perspectives highlight the importance of
the intra- and inter-organizational context which acts to either enable knowledge
work or, conversely, obstruct knowledge work processes. Organizational culture,
time, diversity, autonomy, shared identity, shared perspectives, trust, social net-
working, boundary spanning, boundary objects and so on are all crucial enablers
of knowledge work. In totality these all constitute the ‘ideal’ enabling context for
knowledge work. However, in practice, different aspects of the enabling context
play a greater or lesser role in facilitating particular knowledge processes. On this
basis issues such as trust, boundary spanning and so on are discussed in relation to

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