Making Knowledge Visible through Intranet Knowledge Maps: Concepts, Elements, Cases

This paper seeks to establish the conceptual and empirical basis for an innovative instrument of corporate knowledge management: the knowledge map. It begins by briefly outlining the rationale for knowledge mapping, i.e., providing a common context to access expertise and experience in large companies. It then conceptualizes five types of knowledge maps that can be used in managing organizational knowledge. They are knowledge-sources, assets, -structures, -applications, and -development maps. In order to illustrate these five types of maps, a series of examples will be presented (from a multimedia agency, a consulting group, a market research firm, and a mediumsized services company) and the advantages and disadvantages of the knowledge mapping technique for knowledge management will be discussed. The paper concludes with a series of quality criteria for knowledge maps and proposes a five step procedure to implement knowledge maps in a corporate intranet.