Preface

The business environment is rapidly changing, and intellectual capital has 
become a key asset of the enterprise. By managing its knowledge assets, an 
enterprise can improve its competitiveness and adaptability and increase its 
chances of success. In this issue of the IBM Systems Journal, ten papers and 
two essays deal with various aspects of knowledge management: technology, 
process, and people. 

We gratefully acknowledge the efforts of our two coordinators, Robert Mack and 
Laurence Prusak, in putting together the current issue. We also thank Robert 
Cross for his help in the acquisition of papers, and Alan Marwick for his help 
in planning this issue. 

In the paper "Knowledge management technology," Marwick surveys some of the 
technologies used in knowledge management and discusses their support of the 
explicit and tacit forms of knowledge. He finds that the strongest support for 
knowledge management solutions comes from technologies that deal with explicit 
forms, such as search and classification. He also points to some encouraging 
developments, such as use of text-based chat and unrestricted bulletin boards, 
that might enable the transformation of some tacit knowledge into explicit 
knowledge. 

As organizations grow in size, geographical scope, and complexity, it is 
increasingly apparent that communities of practice--groups whose members 
regularly engage in sharing and learning, based on common interests--can 
improve organizational performance. In "Communities of practice and 
organizational performance," Lesser and Storck suggest that we think of a 
community of practice as an engine for developing social capital. Furthermore, 
they suggest that building social capital is based on the existence of 
communication channels between practitioners, on relationships that build trust 
and a sense of mutual obligation, and on a common language and context for the 
community. 

In 1995, IBM Global Services began implementing a business model that included 
developing a set of communities of practice based on the core competencies of 
the organization. In "Evolving communities of practice: IBM Global Services 
experience," Gongla and Rizzuto describe their experience working with over 60 
communities over a five-year period, focusing specifically on how communities 
evolve. They present and discuss an evolution model in terms of persons and 
organization behavior, supporting processes, and enabling technology factors. 

Knowledge management is often seen as a problem of capturing, organizing, and 
retrieving information. In "The knowledge management puzzle: Human and social 
factors in knowledge management," Thomas, Kellogg, and Erickson argue that it 
is essential for those designing knowledge management systems to consider the 
human and social factors at play in the production and use of knowledge. They 
first review work that emphasizes cognitive and social factors in knowledge 
management. Then they describe two approaches to designing socially informed 
knowledge management systems, social computing and knowledge socialization. 

When defining knowledge management some people emphasize intellectual capital, 
others think of supporting technologies, whereas others put community building 
first. In the essay "Views of knowledge are human views" Dueck suggests that a 
person's temperament determines that person's view of knowledge. He shows that 
tools such as the Keirsey temperament test help illustrate the often overlooked 
fact that people are different from one another, and some of these differences 
are profound and influence the way each person sees the world. 

In "Linking e-business and operating processes: The role of knowledge 
management," Fahey et al. take a process perspective and reflect upon the value 
e-business knowledge contributes in the enhancement of three core operating 
processes: customer relationship management, supply chain management, and 
product development management. Moreover, in two case studies, they contrast 
the strategies of two companies in the e-business-driven transformation of 
their customer relationship management. 

In "Knowledge resource exchange in strategic alliances," Parise and Henderson 
present a model that might help businesses in designing a profitable alliance 
strategy. This model, which is based on the knowledge exchange between alliance 
partners, involves the different dimensions of knowledge resources (tacitness, 
specificity, and complexity), as well as the different roles of the partner 
(complementor, competitor, supplier, customer, or other). Their findings 
suggest that what is important is not necessarily a particular alliance 
strategy, but rather an alignment between alliance strategy and business 
strategy. 

Capturing knowledge created by knowledge workers on their jobs and making it 
available to other employees is an important goal of knowledge management, and 
one of the emerging tools to achieve this goal is the knowledge portal. In 
"Knowledge portals and the emerging digital knowledge workplace," Mack, Ravin, 
and Byrd discuss knowledge portal applications developed for use by IBM Global 
Services practitioners. They describe the role knowledge portals play in 
supporting knowledge work, as well as the component technologies embedded in 
portals, such as the gathering of distributed document information, indexing 
and text search, and categorization. 

The Lotus Knowledge Discovery System* is the main knowledge management product 
of the IBM Corporation. It uses several leading-edge technologies to 
systematically create associations between corporate expertise and information 
resources, to personalize and organize knowledge for individuals and 
communities, and to provide a place for teams to work, make decisions, and act. 
It also creates a searchable index, computes document values, and provides a 
search-and-browse user interface. In "The Lotus Knowledge Discovery System: 
Tools and experiences," Pohs et al. describe the technology behind the product, 
as well as their experiences in deploying this product within the U.S. Joint 
Forces Command, one of the product's earliest adopters. 

Unlike numerical and fixed field data, text cannot be analyzed by standard 
statistical data mining methods, and thus the wealth of knowledge in large text 
databases is not readily accessible. Relying on people to perform the analysis 
can uncover only a tiny fraction of this knowledge. In "Text analysis and 
knowledge mining system," Nasukawa and Nagano focus on text mining technology 
that allows the extraction of knowledge from large amounts of textual data, and 
they describe a prototype system implementing this technology. Using this 
prototype on text databases of customer service centers, they were able to 
trace product failures, to determine the factors that have led to rapid 
increases in the number of service calls, and to assess help center 
productivity. 

Although humans understand speech with ease and use speech to express complex 
ideas, automatic speech recognition with computers is hard, and extracting 
knowledge from speech is even harder. In "Toward speech as a knowledge 
resource," Brown et al. survey the current state of the art in speech 
recognition and the relevant, successful applications of speech recognition in 
multimedia indexing and search. Furthermore, they present a number of 
exploratory applications of speech recognition that advance the goal of using 
speech as a knowledge resource. 

In the essay "Where did knowledge management come from?" Prusak looks at the 
history of knowledge management and offers insights into what knowledge 
management means today and where it may be headed in the future. 

The next issue of the Journal contains papers on software engineering that 
focus on software debugging, testing, and verification. 

Alex Birman                          John J. Ritsko
Associate Editor                     Editor-in-Chief

*Trademark or registered trademark of Lotus Development Corporation and/or 
International Business Machines Corporation.