Knowledge Management

Abstract

It is contended that knowledge management is directed towards finding out how and why information users think, what they know about what they know, the knowledge and attitudes they have and the decisions they make when they interact with others. At the heart lies the mutation of information into knowledge, a process best understood through seeing, knowing and information retrieval as features common to cognitive psychology and information management. The knowledge we have of knowledge, and changes to knowledge, can be monitored in negotiations like knowledge interviews for trainees. Such knowledge and belief systems can also be translated into managerial strategies, both qualitative, as when we emphasise value and benefit in the marketing approach to information, and quantitative, as when we devise ways of assessing probabilities with which desired outcomes will occur. Knowledge management is as much the management of meaning as management of entities and people, for in meaning lies the key to our understanding of what we decide to do as information managers. It is a multi‐disciplinary field offering a semantics and pragmatics for the evaluating and self‐evaluating manager.

Citation

Hannabuss, S. (1987), "Knowledge Management", Library Management, Vol. 8 No. 5, pp. 2-50. https://doi.org/10.1108/eb054901