Knowledge Organization or Information Organization? A Key Component of Knowledge Management Activities

This paper focuses on the various bibliographic and information retrieval tools and techniques used for information organization, a key activity in a knowledge management process. The paper begins with the existing debate on the very concept of knowledge management, and looks at some recent papers and arguments on this issue. It then briefly discusses how some projects over the past decade or so have used various traditional bibliographic organization tools for providing access to electronic resources. This follows examples of some sophistical information organization techniques used by some speciality search engines. It is argued that these tools and techniques, although are quite useful, cannot be used as such in a knowledge management environment. A generic model of information access in a knowledge management environment is then proposed, and new areas of research, especially in the context of information organization are discussed. Introduction Since the mid-nineties there has been a steady growth in the literature on the concept of knowledge management. Hundreds of books have been published, and thousands of papers have appeared in journals and conferences. Although this is predominantly a management concept and is meant for business organizations, the field of knowledge management has attracted experts from many different fields including business and management sciences, information and library studies, computer science and artificial intelligence, and so on. Consequently many different definitions and interpretations of knowledge management exist. One of the most commonly used connotations of knowledge management is that it is a process of capturing and making an organization’s collective expertise anywhere in the business – on paper, documents and databases, or in people’s heads. Simply speaking knowledge management is concerned with managing both recorded (i.e. explicit) and tacit knowledge. By analyzing 16 different definitions of knowledge management, Awad and Ghaziri (2004) outline the following characteristics of knowledge management: • KM deals with knowledge from external as well as internal sources including documents and databases • KM systems embed and store knowledge in business processes, products and services • KM systems’ objective is to promote growth, transfer and share of knowledge within the organization • KM systems aim to assess on a regular basis the knowledge assets of an organization and its impact.