Know what you know.

Knowledge management (KM) has become one of the hottest management topics on companies' agendas. A search on the Internet will lead you to literally thousands of Web pages and a few hundred books dedicated to the subject. Organizations have added the titles of "Knowledge Manager," "Director of Knowledge Management," and "Vice-President of Intellectual Capital" to the roster of their management teams. And even an entire industry has evolved out of the need for companies to capture and retain their employees' brainpower.

The Gartner Group estimates that by 2003, more than half of the Fortune 1000 companies will implement a knowledge management system. As companies become more globally-focused in their strategies, they require information to be shared quickly across great distances. Knowledge has thus become the currency of competitiveness and success.

As Marjo Johne reports in "What do you Know" (pg. 20), the importance of putting in place a system that can effectively capture and disseminate an organization's body of knowledge has, over the last several years, become the most important new corporate resource. Today, companies are told, you have to know what you know and continually learn from it.

"By implementing a knowledge management system, you're making it easier for staff to find information," says Ash Sooknanan, knowledge manager at the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board of Ontario (WSIB). "But you've also created a large community within your organization, and this community has a knowledge-sharing culture."

Knowledge can be classified as "tacit" or "explicit," and the difference shapes how the knowledge content is managed. Explicit knowledge is what has been written or otherwise recorded, such as in books, manuals and databases, for example. It can be readily identified, captured and shared. Tacit knowledge, on the other hand, is personal, hard to formalize and communicate to others. It's the embedded wisdom and expertise in people's heads -- ideas and know-how -- making it much more difficult to extract and share.

Integrating knowledge management with the business strategy and core business processes certainly has its fair share of challenges -- it involves effecting a cultural change across an organization. Getting people to use and contribute to a KM system is half the battle. The real gauge of success is how much people are using it, and how it is improving the way they work.

Kristin Doucet

Editor