Development of Knowledge Management (5)

According to Michael Koenig and Kenneth Neveroski (2008) knowledge management has gone through four stages:

I Stage: An emphasis upon the new technology and upon the development of "best practices" or "lessons learned". The initial stage of KM was driven primarily by information technology. That stage has been described in an equestrian metaphor as "by the Internet out of intellectual capital" (Koenig, 2002).

II Stage: An increased recognition of human and cultural factors, and upon the development of "communities of practice" to facilitate the sharing of information. Two major themes from business literature were brought into the KM fold: learning organization and tacit knowledge. The first theme was connected with Peter Senge's work on the learning organization. The second was Nonaka's work on tacit knowledge and how to discover and cultivate it. Both were not only about the human factors of KM implementation and use, they were also about knowledge creation as well as knowledge sharing and communication (Koenig, 2002).

III Stage: An increased recognition of the importance of designing the systems for retrievability, and the importance of data design and structure, including taxonomy development and utilisation. The hallmark phrases emerging for the third stage are content management (or enterprise content management), metadata and taxonomies (Koenig, 2002).

IV Stage: An emphasis upon extending KM systems beyond the parent organisation to include, for example, vendors and suppliers, customers, users, alumni, etc.

However, new stages don't replace earlier stages; they merely add an emphasis to aspects of KM that though there all along, were inadequately recognized previously.

Koenig and Neveroski (2008) believe that KM has exhibited remarkable staying power and growth in a fashion that is dramatically different from all other business enthusiasms of the late 20th century.