An Epistemological Literature Review on Knowledge and Knowledge Management

Knowledge Management is among the most fashionable subjects in the industry. Unfortunately what is Knowledge and what is Knowledge Management is not properly known in most of companies. This implies confusion for those who would like to start to apply Knowledge Management and most of the time sets in a quite confusing position the newly named “Knowledge Management Officer”. The purpose of this working paper is to extract from the literature on Knowledge Management an understandable set of definitions to get a clear understanding of Knowledge Management. First of all Knowledge is defined because it is not possible to talk about Knowledge Management without a clear understanding of its base. It is also important to define properly the vocabulary that will be used and avoid confusion with words like “information” and “data”. Some Knowledge Management project examples will be listed to provide a link from theory to practical corporate problems.