IBM researchers
are creating
tools to help
people within
organizations
locate, share
and manage
knowledge
Since it first surfaced in the early 1980s, knowledge management has come to stand for
a host of worthy objectives. The foremost, perhaps, is that of making better use of an
organization's most important asset: the accumulated information,
skills and know-how people have in their heads.
The idea was that such tacit, unexpressed knowledge could be captured and made
available to others within the organization, thereby ensuring that the best solutions
and practices became widely known. It soon became apparent that, for that to happen,
a company had to pay attention to a lot of issues, says Alan Marwick, one of IBM Research's
strategists in the field of knowledge management. "Above all, it has become clear that the culture within an organization had to change. While the underlying technology of finding and distributing knowledge
is necessary, it is not in itself sufficient."
Until an organization has reached the point at which its members are regularly
making their knowledge available -- for example, by posting it to an intranet --
the best searching and categorizing tools in the world won't help, Marwick points out.
Yet cultural change is often the most difficult. After all, just how do you go about "creating
a knowledge sharing culture"?
Companies around the world are demonstrating there are lots of ways to get started. IBM itself has been a leader in this area. IBM Global Services, for example, created an award-winning intellectual capital management tool called ICM AssetWeb that allows its teams to share and reuse information, experiences and other
assets they create in the course of their work.
Today, as companies begin to recognize the value of a learning organization, they are beginning to transform fundamental aspects of their business. Greater competitiveness is one motive. But many companies are also offering products and services for a growing knowledge management market, for which a recent IBM study estimated a value of tens of billions of dollars per year, and a compound annual growth rate of 36 percent over the next five years.
IBM researchers are expanding the frontiers of knowledge management through a number of projects, some of which have already grown into full-fledged products.
Many Research projects in knowledge management have been reported in earlier issues of this magazine. This article continues our ongoing survey of knowledge management efforts. Underlying all the projects described here is a simple belief: all of us could be far more productive if only we could find a more direct path to critical data, information, knowledge and people.
