3 | 2002
The Claim
Knowledge management is accomplished by advanced digital technologies that seamlessly capture, classify, organize, search, and retrieve organizational knowledge and then disseminate it to people when, where, and how they need it.

The Response
Technology vendors have hijacked knowledge management as a buzzword to sell more IT tools and products. Knowledge management investments are better spent on the "wetware" of human intelligence and social technologies to create shared meaning as a foundation for better decisionmaking.


"Technology breakthroughs will not change the simple fact that information and data without context and shared meaning are useless."

-- Verna Allee, Guest Editor



Opening Statement
Verna Allee

The New Face of Knowledge Management: Integrating KM Processes and Technology
Steven Cavaleri

A Framework for Knowledge Management
Mark W. McElroy

Global Knowledge: How Shell Developed Global Communities of Practice
Richard McDermott and R. Jeff Jackson

Humanistic Knowledge Technology
William Seidman

The End of the Beginning: The Future of Knowledge Management
Stowe Boyd

Next Issue

Web Services: "You Say You Got a Real Solution..."
Guest Editor: Rob Austin

"Web services" offer an exciting vision of the future of IT service delivery in which widely diverse and physically distributed servers and applications interact seamlessly and automatically via standardized interfaces. In a sense, Web services represent the natural extension of the modular, open architectures of the Internet to higher-level applications. But is the application-level modularity depicted in the Web services vision really feasible? What will the IT services industry look like if Web services are successful? As the Beatles said, "Well, you know, we'd all love to see the plan..." Tune in next month and check out the Web services "revolution" for yourself.



There has been an explosion in knowledge-focused technologies, ranging from data mining and search engines to portal technology and Web conferencing. Vendors claim "knowledge technologies" will solve most, if not all, of an organization's knowledge challenges. But will they live up to their billing, or have vendors missed the point? Can technology leverage human knowledge, or are we better off investing more in human interaction? Whether you incline to people or portals, tune in for another spirited debate.