2. Background and basic concepts

Knowledge Management (KM), as a term and as a component of the operating structures of commercial companies and other organisations, has a short history, probably going back only to the early or mid 1990s. Its development has nevertheless been accompanied by a multitude of articles and more extensive publications by a great number of authors, often with conflicting views and opinions. It is therefore useful to define KM in its simplest terms, on which at least some of the authors are in broad agreement.

According to Gurteen (1998) ‘ Knowledge management is the collection of processes that govern the creation, dissemination and leveraging of knowledge to fulfil organisation objectives.’

On similar lines Megan Santosus and Jon Surmacz say ‘Knowledge management is the process through which organisations generate value from their intellectual and knowledge-based assets.’

Both definitions focus on KM within organisations but the importance of personal knowledge and personal KM is not to be ignored because the knowledge of individuals within an organisation is a crucial component of group intellectual capital.

The interest in KM has been spawned by different factors, such as the growth in recognition of the relevance and importance of intellectual capital to an organisation’s capability and the rapid technological advance that has made it possible to acquire and process large amounts of information, especially through the internet. One of the roles of a KM system is to sift information and process it into useful knowledge.

As the TOP makes clear, the terms information and knowledge – and data – have quite different meanings. Knowledge is derived from data and information, basic terms that need to be clearly understood. They are looked at in some detail in Chapter 2 of the TOP. The various types of knowledge – tacit, implicit, explicit and indigenous - are given equally full explanations and the text also discusses the relationship between tacit, explicit and implicit knowledge and gives an illustration of how tacit knowledge can be transformed into explicit knowledge and vice versa.

In general, story telling is a powerful instrument within KM, not least because stories can tell of the successes and the failures of KM interventions and often more can be learned from the mistakes than from the successes. Management of stories is an area of growing interest and there is some debate about whether story telling is primarily about knowledge or information management (IM).