Foundation of Knowledge Management Systems

Abstract

Recently, knowledge management has received a lot of attention in scholarly as well as in practitioner-oriented literature and in professional services firms as well as in business organizations of all industrial sectors. Due to the large demand for concepts and theories to support a systematic intervention into the way an organization handles knowledge, the field has attracted researchers from different disciplines and has absorbed a wide array of research questions and approaches to solve these questions. This chapter is devoted to give an overview of the roots of knowledge management, the historical development of the literature and practice in some of its predecessors, especially organizational learning and organizational memory approaches.