People-focused knowledge management

participate in activities such as tutoring in public schools on company
time. It provides company-based health services and daycare, and it
provides flextime work arrangements. Every year, Solitus employees
consistently work fewer overtime hours compared to its competitors
and other high-technology companies. Solitus is considered to be the
preferred employer and has low personnel turnover, with the result
that workforce expertise has grown to become high and well 
distributed.
Hans Schelling and his management team are convinced that the
company’s performance and success are a result of its management
philosophy, principles, and objectives. Accordingly, they plan to con-
tinue to build Solitus strategy on this foundation.
What Future Knowledge Management Business
Users May Expect
Globalization has placed businesses everywhere in new and dif-
ferent competitive situations where knowledgeable, effective behav-
ior has come to provide the competitive edge. Enterprises have turned
to explicit and systematic knowledge management to develop the
intellectual capital needed to succeed. Further developments are
expected to provide considerable benefits resulting from changes 
in the workplace and in management and operational practices.
Changes will come partly from information technology and artificial
intelligence developments. However, more important changes are
expected in people-focused practices to build, apply, and deploy
knowledge and understanding for support of innovative and effec-
tive knowledge-intensive work.
Next generation KM methods will still be crude. We need new 
theories of the firm and of knowledge to establish new perspectives
ch08.qxd 5/3/04 2:32 PM Page 252

---

People-Focused Knowledge Management Expectations
253
of enterprise operation and performance. In the meantime, users can
expect significant benefits from KM as it develops over the next
decades.
Explicit and systematic KM methods are now recognized as impor-
tant approaches to improve enterprise performance, either through
knowledgeable people delivering work more effectively or through
other ways of leveraging intellectual capital (IC). KM has been
treated by many authors.
1
Significant advances have been made
during the last decade, and we can expect further changes, creating
entirely new directions or refining present methods. KM in part deals
with human understanding and mental models and with how these
are used in work. Consequently, we may see advances for a long time
to come — however, we may not associate all these changes with KM;
many will integrate systematic KM into daily work and no longer
consider it knowledge management.
We could focus on how KM methods and the KM market can be
expected to develop. Instead, let us explore how future KM may
affect organizations, people, and society where the real value of KM
is realized. From that perspective, we are particularly interested in
what explicit and systematic KM may come to mean from the per-
spectives of users and adopters.
Our interest is in KM from the perspective of how it is conducted
within the enterprise, but other views exist. One such view is that
commercial KM also incorporates the marketplace of KM-related
software, information and content services, professional infor-
mation technology and KM-related services, and business process
management.
During the last several decades, KM has become a central man-
agement topic throughout most of the world. With globalization
opportunities and pressures, coupled with worldwide communica-
tion, emphasis on personal and structural intellectual capital assets
has become a necessary cornerstone for competitive behavior in the
knowledge economy. Although KM is still in its infancy, it has already
become very valuable for those enterprises that practice it. During
the last 15 years, KM has changed from one generation to the next
through constant improvements and new perspectives. A new gener-
ation knowledge management (NGKM) is emerging with fresh objec-
tives, methods, and results. Enterprises that practice NGKM pursue
broader concepts and in other ways depart from earlier KM
approaches by exploiting underlying mechanisms, whether econom-
ical, social, psychological, organizational, or technical. Organizations
that have adopted NGKM (without calling it KM!) include the SAS
ch08.qxd 5/3/04 2:32 PM Page 253

---

254
People-Focused Knowledge Management
Institute, Nokia, Chaparral Steel, Buckman Laboratories, W. L. Gore
& Associates, and Malden Mills.