Fact #1. KM is not useless: The entire idea sits on the fact that it’s a long-term strategy to maintain the existing knowledge of the person/organization and also to harvest the “new” knowledge, which a person acquires during his process of learning. Debating what knowledge management “is not” is pointless. People intuitively know whether they are managing their own knowledge well and whether their organization helps them to work without stress and inefficiency.

Fact #2. People and technology: People should not have to choose between knowing a little about lot or a about a little. They should be able to concentrate most on what they need to know most and, when needed, find out a lot about related things. This requires a browseable knowledge environment designed the way people think. People want to solve problems, think, and collaborate. They do not want to “use technology”. Technology is a means, not an end. Technology must serve people, not the other way around. Technology creates knowledge management problems faster than it creates knowledge management solutions. If knowledge management were intuitive, organization would have perfected it by now.

Fact #3. Financial factor: The cost of not managing knowledge greatly exceeds the cost of managing important knowledge. Organizations have the habit of externalizing the cost of not managing the knowledge to their customers.

Fact #4. Future trends: Those who want to think and act in integrated, creative ways and solve complex problems need rich, integrated, up-to-date knowledge management environments to support them. The gulf between traditional and knowledge-driven organizations is growing as knowledge-driven organizations concentrate not only on present success but their own evolution so they can better take advantage of the new knowledge-intense environment. 

Fact #5. The paradoxical image: Call it the knowledge management paradox: those who are so busy “putting out fires” that they have no time to tackle knowledge management are those who most need to manage their knowledge better. While many CEO put KM as the top priority, few companies are still at a stage of implementation: It’s the mind shift of the organizational heads to add knowledge to the balance sheet. What we know now is that, those companies that crack strategic knowledge management will be those most likely to succeed in the new economy. The new economy is always termed as the knowledge economy. Hence a company with higher knowledge quotient makes it big!