People-focused knowledge management

Knowledge Will Be Bought and Sold
New approaches to trading knowledge in various forms have
already emerged as a viable business for many parties. Among many
interesting examples is Lotus, the English car maker, which report-
edly receives greater revenues from advising other car makers on
building engines than it receives from selling its own products. Indi-
viduals are able to advertise and sell marketable knowledge products
worldwide over the Internet to recipients, either directly or through
knowledge exchanges.
“Packaged knowledge” has traditionally been passive and has been
provided in the form of books or similar media that must be “read”
by recipients. The marketplace will increasingly provide active forms
of packaged knowledge that (e.g., through reasoning) will address
frequently encountered problems of importance to business and the
general public. Much of this knowledge will use powerful, perhaps
semistandardized representations and ontologies and will apply rea-
soning capabilities that increasingly will be based on natural lan-
guage. We already see emerging sources of prepackaged knowledge
of this kind. In the distant future, natural language processing, sup-
ported by powerful information technology, may be so advanced that
knowledge can be communicated in free-form language. All these
developments will allow users to incorporate knowledge quickly and
reliably into their deliberations — as long as these are explicit. For
tacit evaluations and decisions, which most are, the obtained knowl-
edge must be internalized in advance of being required. When the 
situation arises, it must already be resident in the person’s mind in
the form of tacit associations and mental models. In other words,
knowledge workers must have learned and internalized the requisite
knowledge.
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People-Focused Knowledge Management Expectations
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Electronic advisory or consulting services are already emerging.
Knowledge-based performance support systems (PSSs) can be bought
in areas ranging from legal and tax advice for individuals to operat-
ing advice and water treatment guidance for thermal power plants.
Knowledge acquisition will become more reliable, and the market-
place will become more organized. At the same time, we will create
capabilities and functions to validate explicated knowledge. We can
expect that individuals with every kind of expertise will capture what
can be made explicit and present it for sale in the marketplace. Indi-
viduals will trade their knowledge in ways that we now can only
glimpse by acting as free agents to virtual corporations. Now, we nor-
mally see free agents as consultants that are asked to assist clients
with particular problems. A likely next step is for experts, for a fee,
to let clients harvest part of their knowledge to incorporate it into
structural IC that fits their operations.