People-focused knowledge management

Building and Exploiting Intellectual Capital Assets 
Are Important
KM practitioners and theoreticians are developing a new aware-
ness of the need to change the KM focus and approach to a new 
generation of KM. The focus is shifting toward how KM can best
support the desired enterprise strategy and performance and
strengthen the ability of people to act in the interest of the enterprise.
The approach is changing from technology and prescriptive method-
ologies to understanding how enterprise performance is shaped by
people’s actions supported by personal knowledge, IC assets, and
additional resources. The new awareness emphasizes several points:
The KM scope must not only be broadened to include opera-
tional considerations, but must also be collinear with the strat-
egy, direction, and purpose of the enterprise, be it a company,
city, region, or country.
The KM scope must be broadened to focus on the tradeoffs that
are required to secure long-term viability — constrained by the
needs to secure short-term survival (to avoid bankruptcy, for
example).
The KM efforts must be self-sustaining and self-renewing. This
requires that KM becomes an automatic, integral, and natural
part of how everybody pursues “living the job.”
KM must be people-centric, not technology-centric, and encour-
age utilization of people-related mechanisms such as story-
telling, communities of practice (CoP), social networking, and
so on.
Modern IT is vital, at the present primarily for automation and
KM-infrastructure but later to include intelligent applications 
to offload reasoning and other mental tasks from knowledge
workers.
KM must be led by someone to conceptualize an integrated per-
spective of all KM elements into a greater and systematic whole
and coordinate KM initiatives to ascertain that KM practices are
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The Effective Enterprise
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pursued and continue to be effectively supportive of the enter-
prise’s desired direction. This role is needed to coordinate the
many, often isolated, KM thrusts such as knowledge sharing,
storytelling, communities of practice, knowledge harvesting,
various IT-based KM capabilities and systems, and KM-friendly,
culture-promoting efforts.