Knowledge management and librarians and information managers

Abstract

Knowledge management as a conscious discipline would appear to be somewhere between five and fifteen years old. It evolved from the thinking of academics and pioneers such as Peter Drucker in the 1970s, Karl-Erik Sveiby in the late 1980s, and Nonaka and Takeuchi in the 1990s. During that time, economic, social and technological changes were transforming the way that companies worked. Globalisation emerged and brought new opportunities and increased competition. Companies responded by downsizing, merging, acquiring, reengineering and outsourcing. Many streamlined their workforce and boosted their productivity and their profits by using advances in computer and network technology. However their successes in doing so came with a price. Many lost company knowledge as they grew smaller. And many lost company knowledge as they grew bigger - they no longer knew what they knew. By the early 1990s a growing body of academics and consultants were talking about knowledge management as the new business practice, and it began to appear in more and more business journals and on conference agendas. By the mid-1990s, it became widely acknowledged that the competitive advantage of some of the world's leading companies was being carved out from those companies' knowledge assets such as competencies, customer relationships and innovations. (Neef, 1999; Chekland and Holwell 1998; Snowdeen 2000; Bhatt 2001; Raub e Ruling 2001). Davenport and Prusak (1998 §1-3) and Sieloff (1999 pp. 47-53) point out that there is a need for companies to know-what-they-know. Managing knowledge therefore suddenly became a mainstream business objective as other companies sought to follow the market leaders.