History Of Knowledge Management

1. Introduction

Today's rapidly expanding markets and fierce competition demand frequent updating of organization knowledge. Knowledge has become the key strategic asset as well as the most important competitive advantage. By knowing more, organization becomes more capable of satisfying the needs of its stakeholders, employees, customers, and any other party with whom it interacts. Also, through knowing how organization affects its environment, it can work accordingly so as to reduce its environmental impact to a minimum in order to save our planet- our only home. Expanding knowledge, and efficiently utilizing it, leads to an undeniable sustainability which is crucial for any organization.

The global economy has different characteristics

The more knowledge it assimilates, the more powerful it becomes, and this clearly portrays the need to keep itself continually updated, so that it is conditioned and fit to win in the marketplace at all times.

There is a long history for Knowledge Management (KM) efforts. It has been developed from simple activities such as having corporate libraries, discussion forums, mentoring programs, and professional training to more advanced efforts with the advance of information technologies and the wide use of computers such as group decision support systems, expert systems, knowledge systems, and knowledge repositories. Moreover, Internet has an important role in spreading and sharing knowledge across the world.

As knowledge progressively turns into the key asset without bounds, the needs to create thorough understanding of knowledge methods for the creation, exchange and organization of this extraordinary resource are getting to be basic. Despite an internationally growing and exceptionally focused knowledge-based economy, the customary associations are desperately looking for central experiences to help them sustain, gather and deal with the gigantic capability of their knowledge resources for ability to exceed expectations at the main edge of

One of the definitions highlighted that there are two types of knowledge; the first type is called a tacit knowledge which is more about knowing how, while the second type is called explicit knowledge which concerns about knowing about (Grant, 1996). Another description for knowledge is that it is fundamentally the realization and comprehension of information and its related trends (Bierly, Kessler & Christensen, 2000). Hence, knowledge and information are not equal. Knowledge can be considered as second order construct which is built on information as its basic building blocks. Thus, knowledge is utilized to compose the organizational