Where does knowledge reside within an organization?
When work is shared among communities of interest and project teams, individual input is hard to trace. Specifically, it is tough determining which team member is expendable. Some commentators suggest that a “knowledge inventory” should be conducted before a company makes layoff or downsizing decisions. In practice, that is a tricky strategy to execute because evaluating “where knowledge resides” within an organization is a complex task. Identifying the skill sets of employees is a standard KM procedure, but that step, by itself, does not necessarily indicate whose labor can be judged redundant. For example, multidisciplinary teams are lauded in KM circles because they promote synergy. Pulling out the strands of individual merit within a genuinely cooperative effort is next to impossible. Realpolitik: the role of corporate politics KM transforms businesses into learning organizations. As an enabling set of routines and processes, KM imagines a corporate environment where information is
