Knowledge Management: Current Issues and Challenges

Citation

Mason, D.D.M. (2004), "Knowledge Management: Current Issues and Challenges", The Electronic Library, Vol. 22 No. 2, pp. 193-193. https://doi.org/10.1108/02640470410533533

Knowledge management (KM) is the collective term for a group of techniques and technologies that act on knowledge resources. These include ways to create, identify, select, extract, store, transfer, assimilate and use knowledge. It is concerned with the use and optimisation of knowledge for individuals and organisations. There is no generally accepted definition of knowledge itself and no agreement on how best to implement KM and in practice there is an endless set of permutations of technology and paradigms giving plenty of scope for competing points of view.

This book is based on papers presented at the Information Resource Management Association International Conference, held in Seattle in 2002. The subjects are varied ranging from speculation of how to use KM to in the event of another 9/11‐event to tests of established models in practice. There are 20 papers in total. The theme of the book is KM in the human context, advocating a socio‐technical approach to the subject. It is organised into four sections: theory of KM (three papers); management and organisational factors (seven papers); technical challenges (two papers); and case studies (eight papers).

Each conference presenter was asked to prepare a text version of his or her talk for publication. Each paper was required to be a standard length. Not a maximum length, but a standard length, and most authors stuck to this. The result was that short papers had to be lengthened and long papers shortened. This procrustean approach to publishing, while novel, does have the effect of making most of the papers read very oddly. Some are obviously padded and tedious to get through, others have been so abbreviated that it is difficult to make sense of what the authors are trying to say.

The non‐case papers are of mixed, mostly low quality. There is very little original research presented, and of that not enough detail is available within the length restriction to fairly judge its merits. Most of the research reported is in keeping with the socio‐technical approach, typically interviews and action research, but one is an analysis of web pages, which is about as far as you can get from the socio‐technical ethos. An unusually high percentage of the non‐case papers cite their own authors in very similarly titled papers from other conferences or book chapters. Most papers are opinion pieces based on a synthesis of other published work and proposing models of how KM implementation should work or frameworks for classifying KM procedures. Too many simply generate lists or hypotheses or pose rhetorical questions. There are a few good papers, Hussein and Wahba, for example, and Wright and Taylor present their findings clearly and professionally, but then these are the only two papers which are greater than the standard length.

The case studies cover varied experiences from many countries and while interesting enough, they would be much more valuable if they had been given the space to explore their subjects fully. Overall this is a disappointing book with little original contribution to KM.