Essay About Knowledge Management And Knowledge-Related Problems

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In order to be able to assess the value of the individual
elements proposed in the literature for linking ICT to
knowledge management, some idea of what knowledge
management stands for needs to be obtained. Arriving
at a clear-cut, unambiguous conception of knowledge
management is no trivial task. The growing attention
that knowledge management is receiving has led to a
proliferation of viewpoints, approaches, theoretical discursions
and practical tools and methods. To say the
least, these do not converge on a clear and unambiguous
notion of knowledge management. In an attempt to
provide an overview, Verwijs et al. (1999) used two distinctions
for sorting the various approaches. First, they
distinguished between engineering approaches and
management approaches. An engineering approach to
knowledge management is based on the presumption
that problems can be solved systematically by breaking
down the problem into parts, solving the partial problems
and integrating the partial solution into an overall
solution. A management or holistic approach stresses
the need for considering the whole knowledge-related
situation, including the organizational context in which
problems occur and become meaningful. It argues that
the complexities characteristic of knowledge-related
issues preclude the full understanding and control of
knowledge in organizations in identiЋ able subproblems.
Because the management approach claims that aspects
can only be fully understood as related to the context
that deЋ nes them and not only as elements in themselves,
it denies the validity of the thesis underlying the
engineering approach, i.e. that a satisfactory solution to
knowledge-related problems can be attained by summing
up the partial solutions.
Second, Verwijs et al. (1999) distinguished between
four classes of approaches on the basis of their main focus
as regards content: knowledge storage approaches,
knowledge processes or knowledge Џ ow approaches,
organizational learning approaches and knowledge
measurement or knowledge asset approaches. The
knowledge storage approaches typically have an engineering
focus. They concentrate on explicit knowledge
dissociated from the human knowledge carrier, as tacit
knowledge can only be stored after having been made
explicit. Recently, these approaches have shown a growing
interest in the ideas of knowledge engineering and
knowledge-based systems originating from artiЋ cial
intelligence research (e.g. Abecker et al., 1997; Meltsner,
1997; Van Heijst