The Future of Knowledge Management

Ilkka Tuomi
Visiting Scientist
Joint Research Center, Institute for Prospective Technological Studies
[email protected]
22 May 2002

published in:
Lifelong Learning in Europe (LLinE), vol VII, issue 2/2002, pp. 69-79
Ilkka Tuomi 1

The Future of Knowledge Management

Introduction

Knowledge management emerged on the maps of strategy consultants and conference

organizers around 1995. For a few years, it was the next big thing after business
process reengineering and total quality management. It overlapped with initiatives on
competence management and organizational learning, gaining credibility from the
daily news on the imminent arrival of the knowledge society and the continuously
expanding Internet. The early emphasis in knowledge management was on
information systems. Then the focus shifted towards organizational development,
intellectual capital management, and competence management. Towards the end of
the 1990’s, social learning, organizational sensemaking, and systemic innovation and
change management became prominent themes in knowledge management.

In the next years, knowledge management theorists and practitioners will find
themselves asking how revolutions can be managed. If knowledge is power, where are
the limits of organizational knowledge creation? If organizational learning and
innovation imply emancipation of knowledge workers and constant reorganization of
organizational competencies, how the new knowledge-based organization should be
organized? Do we need a new “organizational constitution” that redefines rights,
responsibilities, and relations of knowledge workers and employers? Should we,
perhaps, reconsider the goals of lifelong learning and educational systems in a world
where knowledge is well managed and creative destruction dominates?

To address these questions, it is useful to rediscover the sources of knowledge

management. Where did knowledge management come from and where it is going?

In this article, I characterize the main sources of knowledge management movement,

show how the various generations of knowledge management succeeded each other,
summarize some of the learnings, and propose some future research, policy, and
management issues.

The sources of knowledge management

Knowledge management has its origins in four different disciplines that were
relatively independent until the late 1990’s. The broad discussion on the emerging
knowledge society provided credibility for each of them, emphasizing the importance
of the new rules of global, networked, and knowledge-intensive economy. Each of the
four different disciplines gained momentum from the perceived ongoing
transformation, indirectly amplifying each other.

Below, I characterize these four disciplines of knowledge management as

organizational information processing, business intelligence, organizational cognition,
and organizational development. The first had its starting point in computer
technology, the second on information services, the third on research on
organizational innovation, learning, and sensemaking, and the fourth on business
strategy and human resource management.
Ilkka Tuomi 2

History is always a narrative reconstruction and requires simplification. To understand

the developmental paths and future potential research issues of knowledge
management, it is, however, useful to recall the sources of knowledge management,
also in this somewhat simplified form.

Organizational information processing

During the last two decades, knowledge management has often been associated with
computers and information systems. Indeed, during the first generation of knowledge
management, many initiatives focused on finding a suitable software package that
could be used to make knowledge management happen. Software vendors who
quickly repackaged their existing products as knowledge management systems
strengthened this belief in technology. The idea that information systems were a key
to corporate future gained credibility from popular press, and this belief was rarely
questioned. Often it also seemed that the concept of knowledge easily led to lengthy
theoretical discussions. Software packages, in contrast, were something concrete and
real. In early knowledge management initiatives, project progress was often measured
by counting software licenses.

The implicit idea in the computer-oriented initiatives was that the core problem with
knowledge management was in storing and sharing of knowledge. The belief that
knowledge could and should be represented in and shared with computer systems was
itself based on a long tradition of research. We might call it “the revenge of AI.”

In the early 1970s, research on artificial intelligence to a large extent had rejected its
original goal of finding generic and universal rules that produced intelligence. After
some early successes in the 1950s and 1960s, researchers became convinced that
intelligence required domain specific knowledge. This, in turn, required new
approaches in representing knowledge in forms that could be processed by a
computer. As a result, in the 1970s the focus in AI research moved to systems that
followed a relatively simple logic but which had detailed knowledge of their domain
of application (McCorduck, 1979).

In the 1980s, the increasing processing power and some widely published success
stories resulted in extensive interest in expert systems and knowledge-based
technology. The idea that human expertise could be represented in a computer system
and made available whenever and wherever needed became a commonplace truth.
Expert systems were marketed as solutions to alleviate the problems of organizational
downsizing, retirement of experts, and loss of critical competencies (e.g.,
Feigenbaum, McCorduck, & Nii, 1988).

Knowledge representation techniques that were developed for expert systems were
also understood to be of generic value in accurate classification of human knowledge.
By representing knowledge in forms that had been developed for computers, also
human knowledge was supposed to be exactly represented and its inaccuracies were
to be detected and corrected. Michie (1983), one of the thought leaders of the
knowledge-based systems movement, for example, proposed a computer-based
“knowledge refinery” that was intended for codifying and synthesizing knowledge
from multiple sources. According to Michie, in the emerging knowledge society
Ilkka Tuomi 3

knowledge refineries were to become as central an industry as the oil refineries were
in the industrial age.

The focus in artificial intelligence research in the 1970s and 1980s was on automated
processing of knowledge (e.g. Bobrow & Winograd, 1977). The increasing capability
to store information, however, also made possible new forms of document and
database management systems. One of the most popular ideas in the 1980s was
hypertext. For example, Akscyn and his colleagues (Akscyn, McCracken, & Yoder,
1988) developed a “Knowledge Management System,” also known as KMS, an
interactive and collaborative hypermedia system, which become a key inspiration for
the World Wide Web. The KMS was a commercial version of an earlier hypertext
system, ZOG, developed at the Carnegie-Mellon University since 1972. KMS was
used, for example, to manage the large amounts of manuals at aircraft carriers.

Research on software architectures that could effectively support complex

organizational decision-making also led to various attempts to build large corporate-
wide information repositories. The hope was that eventually such repositories could
contain all the data that was needed for rational and fact-based management.
Management information systems, MIS, were to be built on top of enterprise models,
and the information was to be represented in forms that also the top management
could understand. According to the more futuristic accounts, management was to be
supplied with command and control systems that resembled fighter jet cockpits or
high-tech war rooms. More modest systems appeared commercially as executive
information systems, or EIS (Watson, Rainer, & Koh, 1991). The underlying database
structures were to allow rapid analysis of different decision scenarios, requiring
multidimensional databases and tools for interactive online analytical processing. The
implicit assumption in EIS research was a somewhat traditional hierarchical
information-processing model: the important information processing tasks were
supposed to happen at the top of the organization.

Towards the end of the 1980s, some researchers started to emphasize the
communicative and collaborative possibilities of information systems. In part this was
related to the increasing visibility of computer networks. For example, Terry
Winograd, one of the central figures in the emergence of the knowledge-based
offspring of AI, went on to develop an influential workflow system, the Coordinator
(Flores, Graves, Hartfield, & Winograd, 1988; Winograd & Flores, 1986), which
utilized Searle’s speech-act theory. Various alternative models to describe and
implement organizational workflows and communication processes were developed
(e.g. Auramäki, Lehtinen, & Lyytinen, 1988; Lamersdorf, 1988), gradually leading to
broader concepts computer supported collaborative work, computer-mediated
communication, groupware, and collaboration systems.

In general, the “hard” AI was inspired by a relatively straightforward positivistic

epistemology and a cognitivistic information processing view on human intelligence.
Within this tradition, the nature of knowing was rarely questioned. Knowledge was
expected to be explicit, structured, organized in taxonomies, and semantically
unambiguous. The communicative approach to information systems, on the other
hand, quickly led to more social constructionistic and phenomenological
epistemologies.
Ilkka Tuomi 4

Business intelligence

Whereas information systems and computers were often perceived as the core
substance of early knowledge management initiatives, early on it was also noted that
organizations had managed their knowledge already for a long time. For example,
corporate information services and libraries had employed people who were
professionals in categorizing, searching, and distributing knowledge. The increasing
competitive pressures had in particular increased the importance of competitive
analysis. As a result, large corporations had set up competitive intelligence units,
often closely associated with company information and library services (Gilad &
Gilad, 1988; Stanat, 1990; Ghoshal & Westney, 1991).

The focus in competitive intelligence was on strategic analysis of external information

related to market trends and competitors (Aguilar, 1967; Porter, 1980; Fuld, 1996).
Whereas the information processing experts often approached organizational
knowledge as a technical problem that could be solved by appropriate use of
computers, the problem for competitive intelligence people was in finding,
understanding, synthesizing, and disseminating relevant information. At first, this
intellectual work was assigned to back-office specialists. Their work was greatly
facilitated in the early 1990’s when online access to external databases and news
services became widely available. Suddenly, it was possible to know in real time
everything that competitors and customers were doing, anywhere around the world.
For a while, the dream of perfect information had become true.

Soon, however, it was discovered that perfect information leads to information

overload. As a result, systems that could categorize information based on user needs
were actively studied. Researchers tried to develop domain specific ontologies,
thesauri, and conceptual models that could be used as the basis for categorizing
information and organizational messages. Although the motivation for developing
conceptual models and categorization tools was to improve human information
processing instead of automatic processing, information technology obviously played
an important role also here. For example, at MIT, Tom Malone and his colleagues
developed an “information lens” that was supposed to filter and prioritize documents
and messages relevant to the user (Malone, Grant, et al., 1987), and argued that a new
“science of coordination” was about to emerge (Malone & Crowston, 1994).

Whereas the original focus on competitive intelligence was on top management

strategic decision-making, the expanding computer networks made it obvious that
organizational intelligence exists also outside executive offices and boardrooms.
Indeed, in a rapidly changing competitive environment the most valuable knowledge
was often distributed among the members of the organization. Moreover, top
management often didn’t know who had the critical knowledge. This, again, led to an
emphasis of the communicative aspects of organizational information processing. As
a result, the back-office competitive intelligence analysts started to redefine
themselves as business intelligence professionals. Instead of decision-making based
on pre-analyzed reports and data, knowledge sharing became the central issue for
business intelligence people. Instead of information objects, organizational knowledge
was now in information flows.
Ilkka Tuomi 5

This observation also highlighted a contrast between two views on organizational

knowledge. According to the mainstream information processing view, knowledge
was data and facts that were independent of people and their interpretations. This
implicit assumption made it natural to think that knowledge can be stored in
computers. Business intelligence systems, however, started to evolve toward
heterogeneous systems comprised of networked humans and machines. Information
objects were viewed as enablers of organizational knowledge processes. As such, they
perhaps facilitated organizational knowing. The critical question, however, was how
the organizational knowledge flows should be organized so that the organization
remained well informed. Relevance, a concept that conventionally remained beyond
the limits for traditional information processing, became a key issue for business
intelligence professionals.

Technology, however, pushed itself strongly to the center of organizational spotlights,

creating what one might call a temporary backlash in business intelligence. As the
World Wide Web exploded in the public consciousness around 1994, Tim Berners-
Lee’s original vision of the Web was rediscovered again and again: when all
documents would be on the Web and every document would be linked to every other
possible document, the world could become a better place. Knowledge would be free,
and available when needed.

Business intelligence professionals naturally had some reservations concerning this

idea. They had learned, for example, that sometimes it was useful to keep information
secret. Another lesson was that to be useful, information had to be “actionable.” Even
the best analysis was of no value if it remained on the analyst’s shelf or if the
management was not able to do anything with the information it contained (Fuld,
1996). Relevance was lost, but gradually found again. Indeed, the early enthusiasm
with the Web often quickly disappeared into those mysterious black holes of
cyberspace where time seemed to stop and ancient organizational history still was
ongoing reality.

The World Wide Web didn’t have any effective means to manage access rights or
content and it didn’t have any support for making information actionable. In one sense
it did, however, continue a tradition that had contested the mainstream artificial
intelligence since early 1960’s. Whereas Herbert Simon and the other pioneers of AI
believed that the future of computers was in intelligent processing of information,
Douglas Engelbart argued that computers were a new medium that could augment
human though processes. Engelbart’s Augmentation Research Center at Stanford
Research Institute became one of the hot spots of innovation in computer technology,
leading development in interactive computing, graphical user interfaces, and
collaboration systems. The World Wide Web took this augmentation system concept
to its ultimate logical end: it reduced the problem of knowledge representation to
minimum by assuming that all knowledge can be represented as documents and
associations between them. And the software of the World Wide Web didn’t have any
intelligence whatsoever. It left all the theoretical and practical problems of thinking
and sensemaking to its users.

In hindsight, one could say that this was a wise choice. After all, although we don’t
know what knowing exactly is, humans do it all the time.
Ilkka Tuomi 6

Organizational cognition

Corporate competitive intelligence expanded to business intelligence at the beginning

of the 1990’s when it reconceptualized its task to include the management of
organization’s internal knowledge. Although business intelligence relied heavily on
information systems, its focus was not on knowledge representation and automated
processing; instead, it focused on effective utilization of human experts, expert
analysis, and social and communicative networks. Here it came close to the third
source of knowledge management: research on organizational cognition and
sensemaking.

Research on organizational cognition was historically inspired by the same

information processing view that was the foundation of cognitivistic theories of
human mind (Knight & McDaniel, 1979; Tushman & Nadler, 1978; Egelhoff, 1988).
Aligned with this tradition, which originally conceptualized organizations as
hierarchical information processing machines, the early research on organizational
cognition focused on top management decision making (Ungson, Braunstein, & Hall,
1981).

Although the information processing view was widely accepted, more sociologically
oriented researchers early on adopted a more interpretationistic approach. For
example, Karl Weick and his colleagues published several important articles that
became landmarks in organizational cognition research, introducing constructivistic
ideas in organization science (e.g., Bougon, Weick, & Binkhorst, 1977; Daft &
Weick, 1984; Weick, 1995). This research highlighted the fact that organizational
knowledge is not something that can be objectively recorded and stored in databases;
instead, organizational knowing is an active process where people try to make sense
of their environment.

Most clearly the active process of knowledge construction became visible in

organizational innovation studies. In this area, the limitations of the mainstream
information processing view and its underlying epistemology were difficult to
dismiss. Indeed, the cognitivistic view on organizational information processing
didn’t really make much sense when it was applied to innovative organizations where
machine-like predictability and efficiency were not the primary concerns. Such
organizations, by their nature, were constructing products and processes and related
knowledge that did not exist before. The empiristic epistemology that was the core of
the information processing view and its upgraded form, trivial constructivism, became
inadequate in practice. Innovation appeared as chaos and as something that good
managers should avoid at all costs.

Perhaps just because of that, a key contribution to organizational innovation research

came from outside the US strongholds of organizational science. Ikujiro Nonaka
(1994; Hedlund & Nonaka, 1991) reminded organizational researchers that there were
alternatives to the positivistic epistemology of the mainstream information processing
view. In particular, Nonaka (1988) noted that organizations are not machines that can
be streamlined to their maximum information processing efficiency without losing
much of their knowledge creation capabilities. Just when the good American
management practice was getting ready for the ultimate streamlining of organizational
information flows and removal of unnecessary layers of middle-management,
Ilkka Tuomi 7

unorganized randomness, and, in general, everything that was not directly adding
value to the business processes, Nonaka highlighted the point that this route would be
fatal for knowledge-based companies.

Nonaka’s innovation studies were complemented and to some extent paralleled by

research on organizational learning. At deeper levels, however, Nonaka’s approach
was based on a more radical epistemological position than, for example, Argyris and
Schön’s (1978), or Senge’s (1990) constructivistic and system-theoretic models of
organizational learning. Although Schön (1987), in particular, had emphasized the
importance of tacit and situational knowledge in learning, and the pragmatic nature of
knowing and knowledge generation (Schon, 1963), in Nonaka’s work the concept of
tacit knowledge was tightly linked to phenomenological epistemology. More
specifically, it was linked to an epistemology that came from the Kyoto school of
philosophy, launched by Kitaro Nishida at the beginning of the 20th century. The
Kyoto epistemology was a synthesis of Asian views of reality and knowing and
Western phenomenological philosophies, inspired by William James, Henri Bergson,
John Dewey, Edmund Husserl, and Martin Heidegger, among others (Nishitani, 1991;
Tuomi, 2002: ch. 5). But, of course, managers were not supposed to be interested in
such philosophical details.

Organizational development

As noted, computer people were looking for a technical solution for the problem of
organizational knowledge and business intelligence people were trying to provide
relevant information in a timely fashion within the organization. Organizational
cognition researchers, however, started to question the nature of knowing and its role
in organized social action. It was only a small step to move from descriptions of
organizations as knowledge based entities to their actual reorganization. If
organizations had to be effective in using and creating knowledge, perhaps they
should look different than the traditional industrial bureaucracies. Perhaps it could be
possible to create learning organizations and manage their knowledge creation
processes? Indeed, Nonaka and other researchers interested in organizational learning
already made this transition. Others quickly followed. This linked knowledge
management to business strategy.

Business strategy had since the 1960s focused on effective resource allocation and
analysis of competitive strengths and weaknesses. Knowledge entered the picture
relatively late. The resource-based view evolved to competence-based strategies
(Quinn, 1992; Prahalad & Hamel, 1990; Barney, 1997), organizational memory (El
Sawy, Gomes, & Gonzalez, 1986; Walsh & Ungson, 1991), analysis of knowledge-
based strategy (Gupta & Govindarajan, 1991; Earl, 1994; Hedlund, 1994) and
eventually, to the knowledge-based view of the firm (Grant, 1996; Spender, 1996).

In parallel, intellectual capital movement emerged from a more economically oriented

view, arising from the observation that knowledge was invisible in organizational
accounting and measurement systems (Miller, 1996; Sveiby, 1997; Edvinsson &
Malone, 1997). At first, intellectual capital people focused mainly on the management
and measurement of knowledge-related competencies, with relatively little emphasis
on knowledge generation and learning. The organizational customers for intellectual
Ilkka Tuomi 8

capital ideas were typically people interested in corporate finance, control, and
management accounting. The strategic concern was maximum return on investment in
existing knowledge assets, as well as protection of intellectual property. In itself, the
idea of intangible assets and intellectual capital was not new, having predecessors, for
example, in the human capital accounting attempts (Kiker, 1966) and economic theory
(Tobin, 1978). The emerging knowledge economy, however, made it obvious that
intangible assets could not be neglected anymore. Furthermore, the new knowledge
accounting highlighted the value of social networks, customer relationships, and
learning that was embedded in organizational procedures and systems.

Whereas core competence strategies and intellectual capital accounting emphasized

the organizational level, human resource development started from the more concrete
level of individual skill management. In the tradition of human capital accounting, the
hope was to aggregate individual level skills so that they could be linked to the
strategic needs of the organization. The basic assumption was that management
should know what competencies were available in the organization and what
competencies were needed to implement the selected business strategy. The human
resource people were then supposed to help fill in critical competence gaps by
supporting the upgrading of skills and recruiting people with required skill profiles. In
this way, the intellectual capital accounting and organizational learning approaches
were connected together.

An inherent conceptual problem in skill and competence management systems was,

however, their assumption that skills could be described, analyzed, and accounted for.
To get a sufficiently small list of organizational skills, skills often had to be abstracted
from their concrete settings to the extent that it was sometimes difficult see whether
the abstract skill actually corresponded with any capability. As the internal and
external validity of skill categories was often questionable, the hope for creating
sophisticated intellectual capital accounting systems based on this data quickly
evaporated. Moreover, skill definitions often missed core situational and contextual
factors that played important role in organizational activity. As many important
organizational skills are dynamic and are only learned when they become relevant,
extensive cataloguing of skills was of no help in dynamic environments and
innovation management. Furthermore, many important competencies are socially
distributed and reflect the capability to mobilize resources in social networks. The
capability to get things done in an organizational setting often depends on the ability
to bring together complementary resources and competencies, without actually having
or possessing them. Conceptually, therefore, skill management had limitations. Its
focus was too individualistic and it missed the social nature of knowledge and
organizational action.

The importance of situational and social factors in organizational knowing had been
noted since the late 1980s. In particular, the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, and its
spin-off, Institute for Research on Learning, played an important role in this area (Orr,
1990; Suchman, 1987; Brown & Duguid, 1991; Lave & Wenger, 1991). The research
at Xerox PARC and IRL integrated ideas from ethnographic organizational studies,
social interactionism, and, to a more limited extent, also from the Vygotskian cultural
historical activity theory.
Ilkka Tuomi 9

Summary of knowledge management disciplines

It is obviously clear that the sources of knowledge management thinking, as described

above, had many overlaps. The empirical basis for clustering these different sources
or “disciplines” of knowledge management can, however, be found by looking the
different communities of practice that were involved. In the mid-1990s, conferences
on organizational learning and cognition, business intelligence, and organizational
information systems attracted quite different audiences. The concept of knowledge
management was sometimes connected with databases, intranets and document
management systems, corporate accounting, learning, business strategy, and
management of product development processes. This reflects the reality: instead of
one well-defined knowledge management discipline there were many. Instead of one
“knowledge management”, we, therefore, need several characterizations, which all
remain somewhat ambiguous, overlapping, and depend on the point of time which we
use. The four main knowledge management clusters are summarized in Table 1. The
time period underlying Table 1 is about 1993-1996. This period we might call the first
generation of knowledge management.
Table 1. Sources of knowledge management.
KM cluster Focal root communities Primary object of
intervention
Organizational information Information systems Information systems
processing support, AI experts,
software providers
Business intelligence Corporate librarians, Strategic decision-making
competitive intelligence processes
professionals
Organizational cognition Researchers on Organizational knowledge
organizational sense- processing
making
Organizational Competence strategists, Organizational capabilities
development innovation managers, and management practices
human resource
developers, finance &
control

Knowledge management was a new synthesis of several elements, and as such, it

could not have been defined using available conceptual distinctions. The interest in
knowledge management created a new community of experts who had their own
language and expertise. This “second generation” of knowledge management started
to emerge around 1997 with many corporations setting up new jobs for knowledge
management specialists and “chief knowledge officers”. The different sources of
knowledge management became combined and also quickly absorbed to everyday
organizational discourse. Indeed, today it is increasingly common to argue that
knowledge management was just a hype of the 1990s, which disappears as its core
ideas become integrated into organizational routines.
Ilkka Tuomi 10

What, then, will remain of knowledge management? Did we already exhaust its
energy? Or are we, perhaps, only about to find its essence? In the following, I will
argue that we still have a long way to go.

The third generation of knowledge management

Based on the discussion above and with gross simplification, the first generation of
knowledge management could then be characterized as being focused on information
sharing, information repositories, and intellectual capital accounting. The second
generation brought in the concepts of tacit knowledge, social learning, situated and
embedded knowledge, and communities of practice. On a more practical level second-
generation knowledge management emphasized that knowledge management is about
systemic organizational change where management practices, measurement systems,
incentives, tools, and content management needed to be co-developed (Tuomi, 1999).

Future is always already present, although usually in a laboratory scale. We could

therefore ask where knowledge management is going, and how its third generation
will look like.

In the increasingly informationalized society, the first generation knowledge

management will stay well and alive. It focused on information storage and access.
Wireless networks, information processing capabilities embedded into everyday
environments, and the expanding possibilities for distributed information storage and
processing will guarantee that technological issues will remain important.

Here, however, the purely technology-centric view will give room for a more social
understanding of technology. For example, as Lessig (1999) has pointed out, many
policy and regulatory decisions are implemented through technical architectures. For
instance, the alternative ways to manage digital identities, information access,
security, intellectual property rights, and repudiation of electronic agreements will be
hardwired to information systems architectures. This will make knowledge
management technology a social, political, and ethical topic.

Simple AI-inspired automated processing systems, such as social filtering,

recommendation, and data mining systems will also become increasingly
sophisticated. Multimodal interfaces that handle speech, images, gestures, and text,
will be widely used.

The second generation of knowledge management, however, revealed that this is not
enough. In particular, conventional computers are notoriously bad in handling tacit
and situational knowledge. In the future, computer systems will therefore provide
contextual information and non-intrusive cues that support user’s sensemaking
processes. As sensemaking often requires active exploration of unknown domains of
knowledge, information systems are in the future perceived as resources for
knowledge construction and as tools that augment human thinking. This
constructionistic view also highlights the fact that knowledge acquisition is always a
learning process. As learning, in turn, is fundamentally an interactive social
phenomenon, information systems will support also the mobilization of social
Ilkka Tuomi 11

resources as a part of the learning process. Instead of human capital accounting, the
focus will be on active development of social capital.

In the third generation knowledge management, knowledge representations will be

used increasingly as boundary objects around which knowledge processes can be
organized. Instead of the empiristic attempt to store knowledge in information
systems, knowledge will be viewed in a constructionistic and pragmatic perspective.
Good knowledge will be something that allows flexible and effective thinking and
construction of knowledge-based artifacts.

The third generation will also emphasize the link between knowing and action. Here it
will, however, hit the basic constraint of all social systems. To make knowledge real,
it is not sufficient that one single individual knows and acts based of her knowledge.
All knowledge is inherently social and cultural, and organizational knowledge can
only be realized through change in organizational activity and practice. Knowledge
creation implies social revolution.

A third generation knowledge managed organization would have organizational

learning, knowledge creation, and innovation processes built into its structure. As a
consequence, such an organization would import the Schumpeterian creative
destruction inside the focal organization, putting it into a constant state of instability
and unpredictability. Managers should then learn to manage with limited control and
incomplete information. To limit the associated risks, new organizational and
institutional structures will be needed.

Perhaps this is one of the reasons why knowledge management pioneers, such as
Nonaka, are now looking for routines and disciplines of knowledge creation. To
manage, organizations have to be made predictable. In innovation ecology
predictability, however, equals death. The future of management, therefore, lies in
strategic allocation of chaos, risk, and uncertainty, combined with predictable and
efficient execution of production. The capability to flexibly and rapidly reconfigure
and generate competencies is becoming a core competence of the corporation.

Knowledge management for the new economy

It is not clear what kind of organizations will survive in this environment or what
types of learning will be central. Perhaps we will see increasingly large multinational
corporations as Schumpeter predicted decades ago. Or perhaps the hot boiling pot of
Silicon Valley will be the augur for the future, with its lightning-speed creation,
destruction, and recombination of business models. Maybe work-related competencies
are in the future increasingly created by quick and well-timed traversal through
concentrations of social networks -- perhaps still called organizations or business
firms -- which appear and disappear as bubbles in a boiling kettle.

The increasingly dynamic internal and external environment of organizations results

from the growing intensity of knowledge generation in and around organizations. As
innovation-based competition is becoming increasingly important, the traditional
Weberian hierarchy that was based on a relatively stable division of labor is becoming
outdated. This has also implications outside organizations. For example, the
Ilkka Tuomi 12

institutional and legal basis for employer-worker relationship was based on the idea
that workers sell their labor force by physically moving it to the workplace as needed,
and that the boundary between work and non-work is easy to define. Today,
knowledge workers don’t sell their hands but also their brains. Often the creative
nature of work requires that the soul will follow. Organizations are rapidly becoming
perhaps the most important places for learning work-related competencies and
developing social capital that makes workers employable. Perhaps we therefore will
also need a new constitution that defines the mutual responsibilities and rights in the
worklife.

Work, politics, economy, and the domain of private life have been understood and
organized in different ways in different times. As Arendt (1998) noted, modern
industrial society has been a very special configuration of them. When we move
towards the innovation based economy and knowledge society, they will be
reconfigured once again. Social change will be predominant. The third generation of
knowledge management will require capability to manage change, social conflict, and
revolution. It will require organizational forms that make ongoing revolution possible
without excessively destroying accumulated knowledge assets and social capital or
decapitating revolutionaries in the process. It will also require new institutional
foundations that make productive conflict resolution possible. It will therefore also
require that we understand better the cultural basis of knowing and social activity, as
well as the ways in which social and organizational learning lead to new social
practices.

About the Author:

Dr Ilkka Tuomi is currently Visiting Scientist at the European Commission's Joint

Research Centre, Institute for Prospective Technological Studies, Seville. From 1987
to 2001 he worked at the Nokia Research Center in various positions in the areas of
knowledge technology, strategic management, business intelligence and collaboration
systems, and most recently as Principal Scientist, Information Society and Knowledge
Management. From June 1999 to December 2000, he was Visiting Scholar at the
University of California, Berkeley. His most recent book, Networks of Innovation:
Change and Meaning in the Age of the Internet (Oxford University Press, 2002), links
innovation theory with theory of knowledge creation.
Ilkka Tuomi 13

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