Well, if you're like me, you've probably gathered a lot of hard-won knowledge over the years through a combination of accumulated facts, insight and experience. As individuals, most of us grudgingly accept our declining ability to quickly tap our stored knowledge. But corporations are steadily coming to the realization that they can't afford to lose the collective and continually expanding knowledge of their employees, which they view as a major intellectual asset and competitive advantage.
Most companies have no idea what they know.
Now, consider the impact of these situations multiplied many times over as knowledge is sought every minute of every day throughout the company to support small tasks and large projects alike. International Harvester Corp. learned this the hard way when they were chosen by the Russians to build a truck plant based on their success with a factory they had built for the Soviets years earlier. When the project team at International Harvester went looking for a documented history of the earlier project, they found that none of the individuals who had worked with the Soviets were still employed at International Harvester. In one of the best definitions I've seen of the term, the Gartner Group describes knowledge management as a discipline that promotes a collaborative and integrated approach to the creation, capture, organization, access and use of an enterprise's information assets. British Petroleum, 3M, Bechtel and Xerox are among the companies whose efforts in this area receive a lot of attention.