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Is Knowledge Management a Fad?

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Is Knowledge Management a Fad?
Is knowledge management a fad?

Abstract
Knowledge management is a broad term that includes tools and theories from various fields. T.D. Wilson had been impeaching the need for knowledge management and he had come to the conclusion that knowledge management is just a fad started by consultancy companies and IT/ICT departments. This paper examines the righteousness of this proclamation and provides explanations and specifications of some conclusions that had T.D. Wilson provided in his work “The nonsense of 'knowledge management '”.

Is knowledge management a fad?

1 The need of KM in information society

With the instantaneous global information sharing is arising the need of knowledge management. This is based on the evolution and transformation of society. Every year the amount of the whole human knowledge is doubled. The role of information in current organization has transferred from peripheral and incidental to central and fundamental. Management is no longer supervising their employees, but instead is prioritizing feedback from the employees and therefore the function of the manager has shifted from pure decision making to information processing (Brunet-Thorton, 2010). Information society is characterized by the interconnection of information sources, the ease of transferring categorizing and saving information with the help of applied use of data digitalization. In the definition of information society has the large importance the fact that inner telecommunication structures are more and more dependent on outer telecommunication systems. An example of this interconnectedness can be the internet, which is for our society nearly indispensable. And therefore is enabling the impressive growth of communicational and informational business organizations.
With the beginning of the 21st century we can observe strong globalization tendencies - huge networks if users, which are able to communicate


References: Google Insights (2010) Retrieved from: http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=knowledge%20management%2Cinformation%20management&cmpt=q Sharratt, M and Usoro, A Stenmark, D. (2002), Information vs. Knowledge: The Role of intranets in Knowledge Management, Proceedings of the 35th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. Retrieved from: www.viktoria.se/~dixi/publ/ddoml02.pdf Wilson, T.D Wilson, T.D. (2002) The nonsense of 'knowledge management ', Information Research 8(1). Paper no. 144 Retrieved from: http://InformationR.net/ir/8-1/paper144.html.
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