When people talk about knowledge management (KM), it devolves into highly abstract and philosophical statements. But there is a real world of KM—a world of budgets, deadlines, office politics and organizational leadership. KM projects are attempts to make practical use of knowledge to accomplish some organizational objective through the structuring of people, technology and knowledge content. These projects are appearing throughout the business world.

In  order to understand how knowledge is really being managed in companies today, 31 different KM projects in 20 different firms were studied. In most companies, only one project was addressed, but to get an in-depth look at KM in a single organization, 10 projects were observed in one firm. Site visits were made to four of the firms and the rest interviewed by telephone. The sources of information were typically managers of knowledge projects, or of the KM function across the organization. In addition, many of these firms were participants in a research program on multiple aspects of KM.

Types of KM projects

Great variation was found among the 31 projects. Some were self-funding, using a market-based approach that charged users for knowledge services. Companies funded others out of overhead. Some took a hybrid approach relying on corporate funding during roll-out requiring a transition to self-funding after some period of time. A centralized KM function managed or coordinated some projects while others occurred in a more bottom-up and decentralized fashion. Where some initiatives were fundamental to the very purpose and existence of a firm, others were peripherals. Some defied economic justification and others generated revenue from external customers.

In addition to defined objectives, each had a person in charge of the effort, specific commitment of financial and human resources and a focus on knowledge as distinct from information or data. The projects also shared in common three broad types of KM objectives—attempts to create knowledge repositories, improve knowledge access, and improve knowledge cultures and environments.

Knowledge access and transfer

Another type of project found was predicated on providing access to knowledge or facilitating its transfer among individuals. Where knowledge repositories aim at capturing knowledge itself, knowledge access projects focus on the possessors and prospective users of knowledge. These types of projects acknowledge that finding the person with the knowledge one needs and then successfully transferring it from one person to another can be a daunting process. If the metaphor of a library is useful for conceptualizing knowledge repository projects, then that of ‘Knowledge Yellow Pages’ might best symbolize the purpose of knowledge access projects.

Knowledge access projects vary in their technological orientation. For example, several instances of companies building and managing expert networks or maps of knowledge sources were encountered.
At one company, the expert network was not an improvement targeted at some segment of the operation but was actually the primary business.

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