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Has KM turned the corner? Has it passed away? Is there a
future for this field or is KM morphing into something else? Have we been
incorporated in mainstream management and transformed into a handful of cute
clichés? Did we ever really break away from the charge of being a fad?
True to its diffuse, elemental nature the field of KM still
pirouettes on questions like these.
And it can still spark a good debate in some hallways. But
after 20 years of winding its path(s) this field of study and practice is
now actually considered as such by a number of academic and business
organizations. It is not so considered by others, however, despite the fact
that increasing numbers of graduate students are trained every year and the
scientific literature is gaining breadth and depth. The industry around KM
has gone through its bumps and grinds but seems to have shaken out onto a
relatively productive, if subdued, plateau. And the foibles of selective
perception and contextual action being what they are, most of us believe we
encounter more companies doing KM of one sort or another, in more
sophisticated ways. With some actually intoning the prescription, “Well sure
… this is the only way to manage things today isn’t it?”
Against this backdrop it is indeed a pleasure to assume the
editorial role for EJKM … and many thanks to Feral McGrath for having
carried the ball this far. We come to the job fresh from exciting times at
ECKM 2004 (130 participants, 32 countries, 6 of the 7 continents) and
motivated by having spent too many months administrating academia. EJKM is
to Despres and Chauvel as KM is to many of you: a platform for making a
difference, a way of molding some of the future that imposes itself.
We have plans. You have plans. One of our plans for EJKM is
to actively reach out to you, the KM community, to co-construct plans and
actions that will develop a more robust and exciting community. This is
patently reflexive but would you really have it any other way?
This issue of EJKM submits 8 articles that hail from Africa,
Australia, Europe, North America and the UK that present some ideas that are
genuinely new, and other that deepen our existing literature. Daneshgar &
Amaravadi propose an awareness framework for sharing contextual knowledge
among office workers in networked companies in order to support
collaborative business processes. Durcikova & Everard focus on the issue
of knowledge sharing among individuals and develop a typology that
has academic and practitioner implications. Péter Fehér investigates the
relationship between factors supporting change management and KM
processes. Folorunso & Ogunde suggest that data mining and its
implementation techniques are useful enablers of KM programs. Andrew Goh
provides an empirical assessment of the influence that competence
frameworks and utilization exert on innovation and firm performance.
Handzic & Chaimungkalanont study the impact of socialization on
organizational creativity and suggest that informal mechanisms have a
stronger positive effect than formal ones. Hughes & Jackson investigate the
world of KM in law enforcement and provide an explanatory
sociotechnical model. And Hong Kun Wong argues that a knowledge value
chain provides more operational and explanatory power than the
conventional business value chain for assessing or managing organizational
performance.
We will
be in touch with you soon. |
