"This isn't Kansas anymore," is as appropriate a phrase in business board rooms and shop floors as it was for Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz. The effect of large scale change drivers--globalism, technology, information, and competition--have done as much to change the nature of society and the marketplace as the cyclone did to Dorothy's farm. Like Dorothy, there is no special magic that will make it all slow down or end, but only a recognition of the human resources and collaboration that can help organizations ride the waves of change.

This paper reviews the nature of change drivers and the emerging marketplace, the impact on organizations and how they are responding to demands, and in particular, the importance of knowledge/information and the emerging role of the Knowledge/information manager (K/IM).

Change Drivers

"Permanent white water" was first used by Vaille (1989) to describe the changing, turbulent, and complex environment in which we now find ourselves. All facets of our lives from education and health care to business and leisure are rapidly changing as a result of responding to large scale forces or change drivers. These mega forces include globalization, demographics, technology, information, and competition, and they are intricately related to each other.

That we are in a global economy is no longer contested. Global trade has increased rapidly in the last 25 years, up 225% compared to world production which has increased by only 50% of trade. From 1975 to 1992 direct foreign investment increased nearly tenfold from $282 billion to $2.25 trillion, at an increase of 13% a year. Over the next 25 years economic power is expected to shift to the developing nations where they will grow from less than 40% to about 65% of the world's GDP. Within 10 years the GDP of Asia will be larger than Europe's or North America's by $1 trillion (Steingraber, 1996). In addition, the high unemployment rates of some countries, access to raw materials, reduced regulations, and new markets will make global communication, education, and business highly attractive.

Globalization has also increased demographic changes with easier and faster transportation, intercultural communication and exchange, and mobility of populations. In one large San Francisco company, for example, the new employee orientation was conducted in 17 languages! By 2000, it is estimated that the white male workforce, the dominent constituency in the American workplace, will become with minority,  yielding to women and people of color. In addition, the workforce is aging, single parent and dual career families are increasing, and the level of skilled workers is relatively low compared to our needs. This diverse workforce will require new means for communicating, working collaboratively, and integrating the combined knowledge from multiple perspectives.

Technology, and its mirror image of information, are perhaps the most influential of the change drivers. For example, what it takes the average person one day to do now, took three days in the 1950s, one month in the 1800s, and a lifetime in the 1600s (Bridges, 1994). Work has shifted from the 1900s when 85% of workers were in agriculture (currently 3%), to the 1950s when 73% were in manufacturing (currently 15%), to the service and knowledge industries of present day. With this shift to knowledge industries, by the year 2000 it is estimated that 75% of all employees will have to be retrained in new jobs or taught fresh skills in their old ones. The pace of change and the development of smart products and services also requires that workers at all levels of an organization participate in continual, lifelong learning in order to be employable and add value to their organizations (David & Botkin, 1994).

As a result of these forces, the final force of competition itself has changed. While production volume once provided sufficient competitive advantage, now equally important aspects of work include speed, quality, flexibility, and ability to rapidly obsolete products and invent new ones, requiring a revolution in dealing with information. Arie de Geus, former head of planning at Royal Dutch Shell, reflected that for modern organizations, knowledge and the ability to learn may be the only sustainable competitive advantage for emerging organizations in the new marketplace.

With a reduced profit margin and often oversized staffing, many organizations have downsized in order to compete. In the 15 years between 1979-94, the number of employees in America's largest industrial corporations fell from 16.2 million to 11.6 million--nearly a third (Stewart, 1997). This has required the remaining workers to take on greater and more varied responsibilities, rely even more on technology, and work smarter. For example, The US subsidiary of Nokia, a Finnish electronics company, has annual sales of $160 million, but now has only five employees who carry out a variety of different and demanding tasks (Stewart, 1997). Yet, the people downsized from traditional jobs, rather than increasing unemployment, tend to drive the development of new jobs. For example, in 1996, knowledge intensive companies (those with 40% or more knowledge workers), were estimated to have produced 43% of new employment growth in the last decade (Job creation, 1996).

Organizations have attempted to increase the amount of information available for decision making. Yet, in order to stay competitive, updates in information, and moreover, creating new knowledge are the only strategies that will enable organizations to maintain their positions--thus a problem with too much information. For example, the Encyclopedia of the Future suggests that the information around us doubles every 12 years; the nonscientific information that we must process doubles every 2.5 years; and, other estimates for more specialized fields may turnover as often as every 18 months. In general, information appears to be growing at a rate of ahout 2% per month. The implications of this rate of information turnover and growth are immense (Jensen Group, 1997):

 1. A quarter of training programs more than a year old are outdated and may be useless for highly competitive companies.
 2. The half-life of an organization change effort is only 18 months.
 3. Within two financial quarters, more than 10% of one's loyal customer base will experience some confusion over what a brand stands for due to information overload on brands positioning.
 4. If the knowledge management content has not been purged or updated 100% within a 36-month cycle, the organization's competitive position has been suboptimized.

In the 18th century, Adam Smith wrote, in The Wealth of Nations, about an economy bounded by physical constraints. At that time a large part of economic reasoning was based on how quickly scarce resources could be located, used, and replentished. The First Industrial Revolution involved the steam engine and resulted in its widespread use in transportation, mining, and manufacturing, shifting the emphasis from man to machine. The Second Industrial Revolution occurred between 1860 and WWI, when oil and electricity expanded available power to bring energy into every home and further shift activity from man to machine. The Third Industrial Revolution began after WWII with the advent of "thinking machines" that even entered the realm of human thinking (Rifkin, 1995). The current revolution has even led Business Week to propose a new division of the economy into three sections, including the traditional goods (e.g., manufacturing) and services (e.g., banking, hospitality, auto repair, early education), and adding the new category of information (e.g., advertising, communications, computers and software, higher education, entertainment, securities) (Spawning, 1994).

Like most revolutions, the computer/information revolution is progressing rapidly through its own stages of development. These stages have been characterized by Berreby (1996) and Skyrme (1996): the first decade was dedicated to simple computation and data processing, the second to storage and communication (information handling), the third to bigger and faster processing, and the current decade to cognitive representation (knowledge work). This latter stage refers to ways in which data is represented to the user in order to formulate information and create knowledge. For example, a CEO can now use virtual reality glasses to enter a virtual reality data set and more easily see relationships and patterns with enormous amounts of data in a datamining project (Saviano, 1997).

Yet, data, information, knowledge and wisdom refer to distinctly different things in this revolution. Data refers to facts--raw bits of basic measurements and representations of the world around us. Information emerges when we attend to the relationships and patterns that occur among the data over time, and assign meaning to what we see. Knowledge develops when we use the information to do something, including the beliefs, values, commitment, and designs we attach to the application. Finally, learning and wisdom occur over time and experience as we use learning to adapt to the application (Jensen Group, 1997). The conceptualization of the relationship among data-information-knowledge-wisdom is interestingly parallel to the components of the learning cycle described by John Dewey, W. Edwards Deming, and David Kolb in different decades. It also forms the basis for Senge's formulation of the "learning organization" in which individuals, teams, and the entire organization increases its capacity to adapt.

The term, "knowledge worker," was coined less than 40 years ago by Drucker (1959), when he predicted the rise of a knowledge class. More recently, Robert Reich, in The Work of Nations (1991) identified three broad groups of emerging workers: routine production workers, in-person services, and particularly symbolic-analytic services. The latter (knowledge workers) identify and solve problems and broker solutions by manipulating symbols, represent complex reality into simpler and more manageable models, and communicate these to other specialists who apply them. In the 1950s when Drucker first proposed the idea, these knowledge workers only comprised about 8% of the workforce. By the early to mid-1990s the proportion of the workforce who were knowledge workers were estimated to be about 40% (Aley & Urresta, 1995); by the year 2000, it is estimated that 85% of all jobs in America and 80% of jobs in Europe will be knowledge based (Quinn, Anderson, & Finkelstein, 1997); and by 2015 the number may rise to 90% (Rich, 1996).

The organization's response to change

The traditional approach to organizational strategy and planning has been to predict and respond to steady and incremental changes in the marketplace. However, the more rapid pace of newly emerging economies are a combination of incremental changes marked with discontinuities or periods of rapid break with past trends (Anderson & Tushman, 1991; Tushman, Anderson, & O'Reilly, 1997). As a result, making forecasts and trend projections based on past performance and success will be extremely risky and probably inaccurate. It will also require organizational management based on emergent strategy and surprise. For example:

 1. George Gilder (Gilder's Law) predicts that the total bandwidth of communication will match Moorse's Law--that microprocessors have halved in price and doubled in power every 18 months. Bandwidth, he predicts, will triple every 12 months over the next 25 years. This will almost eliminate the cost of information, thereby exposing virtually all employees to vast amounts of information, teleconferencing, etc., which they must be competent to operate (Jensen Group, 1997).

 2. The pace of change, particularly in the field of technology has been described as inexorable (Work trends, 1997). The power of the PC chip doubles about every 18 months, a single fiber carries 2.5 billion bits of information per second and is expected to double in capacity, as much as 50 times faster, every year for the next 15 years. By 2000, the number of desktop computers is projected to reach 230 million. In 1990 the value of telecommunications and global computer market was estimated at $320 billion, and expected to reach nearly a trillion dollars by 2000.

 3. A study at MIT found that information technology is quite different from all other major types of products. Over a 10-year period it reflected a 25-fold improvement in the relative prices of technology and labor, compared to a 1.4-fold improvemment for the six next most competitive technologies (Skyrme, 1996).

When More is Less: Information Overload

The amount of information and its rate of production is astonishing. More information has been produced in the past 30 years than has been in the past 5000 years. There are nearly 10,000 different periodicals published each year in the United States, about 1,000 books published each day, 60 million pages of technical and scientific literature per year, and the total of all printed knowledge doubles about every eight years (Merry, 1995). In addition, the accuracy of most knowledge has a half-life of about four years, requiring that not only new information must be learned, but that old ideas must be revised. Comparatively, this means that by the time a child who was born in 1995 graduates from college, the amount of knowledge in the world will be four times as great; by age 50 it will be 32 times as great; and 97 percent of all knowledge will have been created since his/her birth (Merry, 1995)! Or, as Will Rogers so directly put it, "The problem ain't that people don't know--it's that what they know ain't so."

More information can actually lead to less knowledge being available due to information overload on those who access, process or use it in decision making (Koulopos, 1997). In spite of a concensus that technology and information are requiring a complete paradigm shift in the thinking of how organizations work, there is much evidence that we have not yet made the transition. For example, researchers at Booz, Allen & Hamilton (Lucier & Torsilieri, 1997) estimate that about 16% of these programs achieve very significant impact within the first two years; half achieve small but important benefits; and the remaining third have little impact on business. Most organizations report using only 15% of the information assets they have available, while the remaining 85% are simply discarded or stored (Unruh, 1997), or is on mainframes and generally inaccessible to users (Koprowski, 1997). It has been estimated that 80-95% of current corporate knowledge is located in paper and electronic documents, many of which are either unavailable or create extensive problems in accessing (Koulopolos, 1997).

The amount of money invested--for decades a sure solution for most problems--has done little to fix what is a conceptual problem. In the last 20 years, American industry has invested more than $1 trillion in technology but has not realized significant improvement in efficiency in knowledge workers and their effectiveness because new methods were simply overlaid on old practices (Halal, 1996; Seely-Brown, 1996). Despite IT investments that exceed $300 billion per year, there has been less than a 1% per year increase in productiveness in manufacturing (Skyrme, 1996). In many cases, a confusion between information and knowledge has led many executives to sink billions of dollars into technology ventures that have yielded marginal results, because users did not have the skills or understanding to use the information to impact the way they conducted business (Malhotra, 1997). A study by the Jensen Group (1997) found that from 60-80% of the workforce can not use data/information/knowledge as it is currently organized, resulting in feeling overwhelmed and indecisive. There is an obvious need for a mechanism in organizations to optimize the use of data, information and knowledge.

Growth of the Internet and Connectivity

The Internet is one of the most recent, fastest growing, and ubiquitous examples of major changes in technology, communication, and business. Although the statistics on its uses and audiences is somewhat unclear, a recent study estimated that there are 30-35 million users in 135 countries (Meeker & DuPuy, 1996).  The World Wide Web is doubling in size every two months, and by 2000 there will be as many as 100 million servers. Electronic discussion forums have rapidly increased, and have been estimated at between 70,000-100,000, and newsgroups number over 14,000.

However, executives are becoming overwhelmed by the profusion of information available. While The Wall Street Journal recently provided 24-hour, seven-days-a-week, interactive service for the Internet (Steingraber, 1996), there are over 10,000 other electronic business newsletter titles and similar number of CD-ROM titles (Skyrme, 1997). However, it is possible to apply structures to knowledge that enable reasonable monitoring. For example, according to Bradford's Law of Scattering (Garfield, 1980), only about 10% of the journals published in a particular discipline account for the majority of citations and thus requiring monitoring. The emerging variety of journals for professionals reflects the growing interest in the field--and all are online. Some of them are the Journal of Systemic Knowledge Management, CIO (Chief Information Officer) Magazine, Knowledge Management World, Electronic Commmerce Weekly, and Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication.

Nearly 75% of Internet growth is derived from the business community, and 65% of registered networks are businesses. These business connections have accelerated at a rate of 261% between April 1993 and April 1994, and over half the Fortune 500 companies have initiated marketing campaigns on the web (Statistics, 1996). A study by O'Reilly and Associates (1996) on conducting business on the Internet found that 57% of the respondents believed that the Internet technology is bringing about an improvement in the business environment.

By 2002, the connectivity should allow 15 million workers to use e-mail and related technologies to telecommute--a 650% increase from 1992. This type of virtual work (from home) can lower employers' space costs by as much as 33% (Davenport, 1995). The convenience of telecommuting has led to some estimates of productivity increases ranging from 15-100%,  with an average of 25-30% (Fisher, Schoenfeldt & Shaw, 1990). These gains are usually due to decreased time spent commuting, greater time to focus on the task, and reduction of interruptions in the typical workplace. While 50 percent of Americans already use some kind of computing device on their jobs, one futurist predicts that by 2000, one billion people will be on the Internet (Naisbitt, 1995).

The internet also provides a channel for asynchronous training to many companies like Xerox, Microsoft, and the US Department of Defense. Budget Rent-A-Car, for example, uses MeetingPlace, a groupware package, to train nearly all of its computer staff at its nearly 1000 sites. This online training has enabled them to cut the 1995 per person cost for training of $2000 (generally for travel and expenses), to just $156 per employee (Edwards, 1998). Likewise, Motorola spends about $100 million annually on training, and calculates a return of $3 in sales for each training dollar spent (Viscio & Pasternack, 1996). Learners can log on any time from any place; learning is no longer restricted to time or location. Assignments can be posted, chat rooms and groupware can enable conferencing, hyperlinks can layer information as much as needed by the learner, interactive tests can be taken, and class size is unlimited (Greengard, 1997). In 1997 web-based training was a $178 million market, or about 2.2% of the market total, while web-based information technology is projected to rapidly expand into a $1.8 billion market by 2000, when it should represent about 15% of the IT market for training and education (Halper, 1997). One manager noted that giving employees information is nice; interpreting information for them is better; but training and nurturing the skills to use and build knowledge is the best (Jensen, 1997).

In addition to training, connectivity enables personnel to communicate more efficiently and on a larger scale than ever before. For example, Merrill Lynch, like other flattened organizations, has connected its 480 domestic brokerage offices directly to the parent office. Business is conducted as if each of the 17,000 branch office contact people reported directly to headquarters for most of their information and analytic needs (Quinn, Anderson, & Finkelstein, 1997). Arthur Anderson Consulting has linked more than 50,000 people in 243 offices in 54 countries. Its T-1 level, fiberoptic, private network connects them through data, voice and video interlinks, and enables them to post problems on BBS's, self-organize around customer problems anywhere in the world, share solutions and resource files, and access field personnel makes it quite powerful (Quinn, Anderson, & Finkelstein, 1997). In a study by Delphi Consulting, about half the companies surveyed were creating an intranet to improve their KM, while another 25% planned to do so soon. About one-third were creating online data warehouses, while 25% plan to; and one third are implementing decision-support tools, with 20% planning to (Hibbard, 1997).
 
 

The knowledge repository designed by Answerthink Consulting Group has moved simple data storage to the next level of convenience for users. They have used a KM suite from Dataware Technologies Inc., to build an information taxonomy that organizes documents for users, and contains metadata (comments on the information contained) so it can be found more readily (Hibbard, 1997).

In a view of a possible future for the US, connectivity on a massive scale is shown by Singapore which plans on being the first "intelligent island," being completely networked by the year 2000. It has invested over $2 billion since 1991 and now offers its three million citizens some of the most advanced finance, freight tracking, and government document processing systems in the world. Trading firms use a TradeNet that cuts time for approval time for imports and exports from two days to 15 minutes; LawNet enables legal firms to immediately access statutes and notices for quick answers to clients (Martin & David, )

Management Support for and Need of K/IM

Some executives consider knowledge to be the single most important resource a company can have, and can represent 75% of a company's worth (Prusak). In a 1995 Knowledge Imperative Symposium, Arthur Anderson & Company polled 80 executives from mostly  large corporations (e.g., Amoco, Kodak, Hewlett-Packard, Pillsbury). About 80% of the managers believed that knowledge management was an important or essential part of business, but only 15% currently did it as well as they would like at the time (Highlights, 1995). They were somewhat less definitive about the emerging role of K/IM. In a study of 431 US and European executives by Ernst & Young, 52% believed that a chief knowledge officer (CKO) would add some value to an organizations efforts to management knowledge, but only 23% rated it as very or extremely valuable (Saia, 1997). Perhaps this was related to their concern over the centrality of their own positions or fear of loss of centralized control over corporate information, For example, in another study of 500 chief executive officers and senior managers conducted by Chief Executive Magazine, 80% of CEOs reported that they considered themselves responsible for managing the company's information assets, as opposed to 9% who said this was the CIO's responsibility (Unruh, 1997). In either case, someone in the organization must manage the knowledge strategy, and at this time few CEO's can, and there are even fewer K/IM's available.

In a 1994 study on KM, the Jensen Group (1997) found that success or failure of implementation of strategy was directly related to the utility of the knowledge being implemented (e.g., degree of integration in the organization, clarity, simplicity of information). In the 10th annual survey of "Critical Issues of Information Management Systems" conducted by Computer Sciences Corp., the top information service issues and needs identified by 339 CIO's included: aligning information services and corporate goals, organizing and utilizing data, using information technology for competitive breakthroughs, and connectivity to customers, suppliers and partners. Several of the rankings had changed remarkably since 1994 indicating rapid changes in priorities in this emerging field (Saviano, 1997).

The value of information

As organizations shift from tangible assets to intangible knowledge-based assets, it becomes apparent that traditional measures of worth are insufficient. For example, in June 1997, the ratio of market to book value for all of the Dow Jones Industrials was 5.3 in contrast to a ratio of over 10 for knowledge-intensive companies (e.g., Microsoft, pharmaceuticals, etc.) (Skyrme, 1997). Handy (1995) estimates the intellectual assets of a corporation are usually 3-4 times its tangible book value.

Businesses in the US paid $1.5 billion in 1996 to consultants for knowledge management, and are projected to pay about $5 billion a year for it by the year 2000, according to the Gartner Group (Hibbard, 1997). For do-it-yourselfer's, a study by Ernst & Young's Center for Business Innovation and Business Intelligence found that 94% of their respondents reported that they could leverage knowledge more effectively through deliberate management. More than 40% reported that they had already started or finished a KM project, and 25% indicated they planned to do so within a year. Of those surveyed, 83% said that innovation was the most valuable outcome they would derived from KM (Hibbard, 1997).

The Value of Knowledge: Competitive Advantage

Francis Bacon noted that "knowledge is power." What is unique about it is that, unlike other economic forms of goods, it appears to be inexhaustible in that people can perpetually create new knowledge. As a result, organizations can continue to exploit knowledge and knowledge management as a resource and thereby enhance their survival and competitive advantage (Hage, Collins, Hull, & Teachman, 1993). Some analysts are of the opinion that the only true competitive advantage that an organization will have resides in its knowledge resources that can identify, solve, and broker new problems (Reich, 1991). In a highly competitive environment, it is more important for organizations to learn how to use knowledge to gain more advantage, rather than to just correct problems (Argyris & Schon, 1978; Senge, 1990).

Knowledge management is "getting the right knowledge to the right people at the right time so they can make the best decision" (Hibbard, 1997). On a larger scale, organizational learning has been defined by Argyris (1977) as the process of detecting and correcting errors. There are four activities integral to this kind of learning: knowledge acquisition, information distribution, information interpretation, and organizational memory (Huber, 1991). As information is processed, it expands the range of potential behaviors or flexibility, thereby making the organization potentially more resilient and adaptible to change.

Generally, as organizations gain experience it is easier for them to acquire further knowledge (Argote, Beckman, & Epple, 1990). The acceleration to higher levels of knowledge enable an organization to deal with increasingly more complex and challenging problems and integrate knowledge not previously accessible (Quinn, Anderson, & Finkelstein, 1997). However, maintaining this advantage is difficult because systems tend to replicate past successful strategies rather than innovate, and therefore requires strong leadership and culture to maintain an emphasis on continual learning.

The advantages of traditional management strategies are beginning to give way to newer and more effective approaches. Managed growth approaches typically focus on achieving market and cost position by better, more efficient, management (e.g., General Electric). While this has been a succcessful strategy for decades, innovation-growth strategies that focus on leveraging strategic innovation in streams of product innovations, drive even greater growth and profitability (e.g., Wal-Mart, Microsoft, Southwest Airlines, The Gap). For example, in a 1996 study by Booz, Allen & Hamilton, of 1828 large companies listed on the AMEX, the innovative-growth companies consistently dominated the top 25% of companies in terms of return to stockholders (Lucier & Asin, 1996).

Information and knowledge are increasingly driving gross domestic product (a measure of goods and services and a material measure of how well off people are). Currently about 15% of the labor force is in the information sector and comprises about 21% of the GDP, although it generates about 43% of corporate profits. A secondary information sector (e.g., R&D for internal consumptiion) is worth an added 21% of GDP, bring the total contribution to 46% (Stewart, 1997). Other estimates of the contribution of information are higher, citing it as comprising 79% of all jobs, and 76% of all US GDP (Quinn, Anderson, & Finkelstein, 1997).

As organizations become more aware of the importance of information, and carefully use new tools to develop knowledge, the advantage of K/IM becomes apparent. For example, one form of KM is sharing "best practices."  Users at Columbia/HCA's 340 hospitals nationwide can search and retrieve pages that have been indexed from the corporate intranet. The company's 147 ambulatory surgery centers are regularly visited by a team who identify the best practices, then quickly shares them via posting on their intranet webpages (Hibbard, 1997). Similarly, Texas Instruments saved the equivalent of investing in a new plant by sharing best practice methods among their semiconductor fabrication plants (Skyrme, 1997).

Other examples of information management tools that have led to competitive advantage include Dow Chemical's and Xerox's use of decision support systems. In 1993, Dow Chemical moved into KM by using SmartPatent Workbench, a decision-support tool, to analyze a database of 30,000 patents by Dow and competitors. The tool leads them to project licensing royalties from $20 million in 1997 to $125 million by 2000. It also will cut $40 million in tax maintenance over 10 years by identifying unused patents that can expire (Hibbard, 1997). The Xerox Palo Alto Research Center and Grape-Vine Technologies have developed a new category of tools called "map makers." Recognizing the sheer volume of knowledge residing in warehouses and people, these programs let users themselves decide which documents get routed to them, create profiles of interests, and create a map of the workplace showing where information resides. This has allowed them to improve the "signal to noise ratio" (get what you need out of all the available messages) (Hibbard, 1997).

K/IM Skill and Job requirements

Strategic planning for a dynamic market. Past success is nothing to depend on in a rapidly changing industry, and a deep understanding of the complexities of strategy is necessary to avoid failure in even a great company (Christensen, 1997). Entirely new business structures are emerging for some sectors of the marketplace. Virtual companies, such as banks, may exist only in cyberspace in which there are no buildings, documents, tellers, or money. The decision to what extent to go virtual, for which segments of the business, and with which segment of the market is a complex and often reviewed decision requiring clear strategic thinking (Chesbrough & Teece, 1996). Increasingly, companies must obsolete their own products before a competitor does, which requires extensive updated knowledge of marketing, research and development, and operations (Koulopos, 1997).

Understanding and using new technology. Knowledge/Information managers must understand broad based technology. Drucker has proposed that the information executive requires four sets of diagnostic tools to make informed judgements: foundation information (e.g., standard financial ratios), productivity information (total factor productivity), competence information (e.g., distinctiveness and competitor information), and information about the allocation of scarce resources (e.g., monitoring capital and human performance) (Drucker, 1995). The wide variety of applications have equal variationIn addition to these diagnostic tools, there are many others for variety of functions. In a survey by CIO Magazine and other companies, 208 executives were asked about their current technology portfolios. At least 60% reported the use of project management and network management tools, and there was high use of decision support tools, wireless communication (for tracking delivery), collaborative tools (groupware, video conferencing), product data management, and web sites. Less widely used yet were data mining (6%) and push technology (10%) (Slater, 1997). In 1994, when Monsanto reorganized its 14 business units, they identified nine key technologies that should be built in to their KM system: groupware, messaging, web browsers, document management, search and retrieval, data mining, visualization, push technology, and intelligent agents.

Asset assessment and management. IT investments are growing rapidly in volume. In 1992, a typical large corporation's mix of information technology involved two or more $10-20 million projects. Today, such projects are commonly invested at $50-100 million (Callahan, 1997). As organizations increase their orientation to information capital, new means of assessing the value of intangible assets must be developed. Managers will need to be able to assess human, structural, and customer capital using multidimensional categories. One such example is a system developed by Edvinsson and Malone developed for Skandia Insurance, in which 90 measures in five groups are collated. New kinds of software scorecards are also emerging such as the Skandia Navigator, Sveiby's Intangible Assets Monitor, the Intellectual Capital Index, and Inclusive Value Methodology (Skyrme, 1997).

Understanding security. Attacks on servers and networks hurts organizations, and computer break-ins have increased at a rate of 323% since 1992. A crime survey by the Computer Security Institute and FBI found that over half the 453 respondents identified electronic intrusion as a major concern, and 36% had had break-ins within the past year. Such organizations have reported lost revenus (33%), legal costs (22%), damaged reputation (16%), and loss of competitive advantage and market share (about 10%) (Young, 1996). Computer crime accounts for more than $10 billion per year in losses, and untrained and unsophisticated computer users are often put in charge of the web servers and system administration (Young, 1996).

Performance Appraisal. The new requirements for knowledge workers and the subsequent changes in roles, skills, and performance will mean that new means for appraising performance must be developed. Knowledge sharing is becoming so important that some firms are beginning to conduct performance evaluations and rewards based on knowledge sharing and use by personnel. For example, Lotus Development (an IBM division) devotes 25% of its total performance evaluation to the knowledge sharing by its customer support workers. Buckman Labs has an annual conference at which it recognizes its top 100 knowledge sharers. ABB evaluates managers on both the results of their decisions and also on how they use knowledge and information applied in the decision making process (Davenport, 1996).

Understanding Organizing. The pace of change, emergence of new markets, global connectivity, and need to respond quickly to customer needs has required a rapid restructuring of organizations. The once traditional tall, centralized hierarchy and large expansive facilities may actually become obstructions. For example, Boeing developed its new model of the 777 airplane entirely by computer simulation. The innovation of the teardrop design by running multiple aerodynamic simulations would have been prohibitive in the physical world, but there are limited or no economies of scale in the virtual world (Steingraber, 1996). The new organizational structures range from very flat, inverted pyramids (e.g., SAS airlines, Nova Care rehabilitation services), starburst or networks (e.g., movie studios, mutual fund groups, venture capitalists), and spider webs (e.g., Arthur Anderson's AANET) (Quinn, Anderson, & Finkelstein, 1997).

Including the above skill areas, the K/IM is a generalist working across, or perhaps more accurately, integrating the fields of computer information systems, educational media, and management. A recent review of Arthur Anderson Business Consulting position openings for knowledge team leaders and consultants reflects the following criteria (Knowledge Management Associate, 1998):
 

 1. Collecting, filtering and integrating key proposals, methodologies, marketing presentations, etc.
 2. Promoting and educating consultants on knowledge sharing processes, technologies, and reosurces.
 3. Collaborating with firm experts to capture best practices.
 4. Managing and monitoring communication networks (e.g., discussion databases).
 5. Enhancing knowledge sharing tools to include more detailed information specifically related to areas of responsibility.
 6. Identifying and sharing external information from research groups, marketing publications, Internet web sites, etc.
 7. Developing and maintaining credential packages.
 8. Coordinating with other knowledge management team members to ensure consistency and synergy among Competency Centers and local offices.
 9. Brainstorming new formats and mechanisms to effectively share intellectual capital.
 10. Experiences in social network analysis, distance learning, Internet/Intranet and groupware technologies, organizational strategy and design, organization development, and systems thinking.
 11. Other preferred skills include strong verbal and written skills; previous work experience; experience with database/word processing/spreadsheet software; excellent interpersonal skills.

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