Knowledge management page 2

Dalkir (2005) conducted an informal survey and identified over 100 published definitions of knowledge management.

Dalkir (2005, p.3) provides the following definition:

Knowledge management is the deliberate and systematic coordination of an organization's people, technology, processes, and organizational structure in order to add value through reuse and innovation. This coordination is achieved through creating, sharing, and applying knowledge as well as through feeding the valuable lessons learned and best practices into corporate memory in order to foster continued organizational learning.

Definitional problems also arise because there are more than three distinct perspectives on KM, and each leads to a different extrapolation and a different definition:

• business perspective
• cognitive science or knowledge science perspective
• process/technology perspective (Dalkir, 2005).

KM as a business activity reflects in strategy, policy and practice at all levels of the organization to use enterprise's intellectual assets to achieve positive business results.

KM from the cognitive science or knowledge science perspective perceive knowledge as the fundamental resource that allows us to function intelligently.

KM process/technology perspective stress the processes and technology that facilitate that information is turned into actionable knowledge (Dalkir, 2005, p.5).

KM draws upon a vast number of diverse fields such as organizational science, cognitive science, linguistics and computional linguistics, information technologies such as knowledge-based systems, document and information management, electronic performance support systems, database technologies, LIS, technical writing and journalism, anthropology and sociology, education and training, storytelling and communication studies, collaborative technologies, etc. (Dalkir, 2005, p.6).