Welcome |  Company profile |  Services |  Products |  Solutions |  Resources

Contact us |  Feedback |  Site map
Welcome to the Ripose web site 
Newsletter ... August 2001

Page < 1 2 3  >
Ripose & knowledge management ...
Knowledge is the key driver of life, much more so than land, capital or labour. Knowing how to use land, capital and labour yields greater wealth than that of the individual asset. Present and future success in competition will be based less on the strategic allocation of physical and financial resources and more on the strategic management of knowledge (Bontis, 1996). The capacity to manage knowledge–based intellect is the critical skill of this era (Quinn, 1992).

If managing knowledge-based intellect is the critical skill, what exactly is knowledge management or KM for short?

To begin to understand what KM is we need to fully define  the two words which create the concept.

Knowledge: knowledge is invisible and intangible, and thus it is not captured very well by any of the traditional measures, accounting or otherwise, that corporations master in their everyday operations. (Bontis, Dragonetti, Jacobsen & Roos 1999).

By definition, knowledge is:

  • The clear and certain perception of that which exists or of truth and fact
  • Skill in anything
  • Familiarity gained by actual experience

By definition management is:

  • The manner of treating, directing, progressing or using for a purpose
  
Together, these two concepts provide this (amalgamated) or (combined) definition:
'Knowledge management is the manner of treating, directing, progressing and using the clear and certain perception of that which exists or of truth and fact'.

According to research completed at Charles Sturt University the definition of 'knowledge management' can also be described as:
'The field that examines how understanding, wisdom or intelligence, whether public or private might be captured, represented, cross referenced, stored and applied for a range of intensive tasks – whether that be decision support, computer assisted learning, research (eg. hypothesis testing) or research support'.

However, this still does not go far enough to fully explain KM.

The management aspect seems to be fairly straightforward, but the concepts of 'truth' and 'fact' are more difficult to explain. So, exactly how do we, at Ripose, define a simple answer to this paradox?

Ripose concentrates on solving the knowledge conundrum by:

  • Separating the knowledge concept into information, knowledge and data
  • Showing how these three assets can be clarified stored and communicated

For more details, please read Ripose and Knowledge management and/or ask us for our Knowledge management white paper.

Previous page

Next page

Top of page