Description and Analysis of Existing Knowledge Management Frameworks

There is a growing recognition in the business community about the importance of managing knowledge. Some organizations have taken initiatives to understand and manage this critical resource. Major organizations have appointed chief knowledge officers (CKOs) and chief learning officers to formally initiate and cultivate KM activities in their organizations. In spite of these initiatives, the bulk of organizations still have not approached knowledge management (KM) activity formally or deliberately. The cause for this lack of effective management of knowledge could be that most organizations are still struggling to comprehend the KM concept. The reason for this confusion and lack of clarity can be attributed to a gap between the emerging KM phenomena and the current lack of understanding about this phenomena by researchers and practitioners. To bridge the gap, the fundamental issue of identifying salient characteristics of KM phenomena needs to be addressed. This is a prerequisite for systematic research into the nature and possibilities of KM, as well as for easing the emergence of KM into practice. Researchers have proposed a variety of KM frameworks, models, and perspectives to help understand this emerging phenomenon. Each of them addresses certain KM elements. However, none of them appears to subsume all of the others. The major contribution of this paper is that it presents a summary and comparative analysis of these frameworks. This analysis leads to the conclusion that there is a need for developing a more comprehensive and unified framework for describing the nature of KM. Such a descriptive framework could benefit both researchers and practitioners by furnishing an organized foundation for future progress in understanding and conducting KM.