This paper presents an up-to-date view of the most recent developments and applications of Knowledge Management (KM). In it, we emphasize the critical role the emergence of Corporate Intranets is playing in the global market growth of KM applications, and in the dissemination of KM practices around the World.

Knowledge is information resident in people’s minds, used for making decisions in unknown contexts. Knowledge and Information are distinct entities. While 'information' stored in a computer system is not a very rich carrier of human interpretation for potential action, ‘knowledge’ resides in the user’s subjective context of action based on that information. To have business value, knowledge must be applied to situations on which a decision or action can be made with resulting value added.

Organizationally, KM embodies processes that seek synergies in the combination of data and information processing capacity of information technologies, with the creative and innovative capacity of human beings. Technically, KM is a tool set for the automation of deductive or inherent relationships between information objects, corporate users and business processes. The corporate goals of KM are thus to capture internal and external knowledge, to improve the access to that knowledge, to enhance the knowledge environment, and to manage knowledge as an asset

The adoption of Intranet solutions in Corporations has provided the basis to satisfy most of the basic technical requirements for KM systems. The standardization of intercommunication, the modularity provided by three layered client-server architectures, and the seamless internal access provided by the Internet technology has created an enormous global market for KM systems development. Today, most Intranets routinely support corporate-wide activities like publishing of company information, communication via E-mail, groupware-based work, database access, online workflow management, employee training, and many others.

The demand for KM solutions has been witnessing tremendous growth in the past few years. A survey of 650 companies carried out by Delphi Consulting Group, Inc. in 1997 indicates that 49% already do or planned to invest in KM applications within the next 12 months. Another 49% of companies planned to invest within the next 12-48 months. Dataquest Inc. predicts worldwide sales of KM software and services to double by the year 2000 to more than $5.3 billion.

From the supply side, the most important advances have been made in the field of document management, database analysis, and automatic text manipulation and processing. The most advanced companies in the market offer Total KM solutions with the following main functions:

• Information Acquisition From Various Sources
• Information Discovery Through Agents
• Information Publishing Using Different Formats/Styles
• Information Distribution Through Different Distribution Media

Competing products are presently compared based on features such as

• Indexing
• Knowledge Submission
• Knowledge Retrieval
• Knowledge Repository
• Content Management
• Administration Tools

The paper lists several of the most advanced products now in the market as well as several competing KM suppliers. Examples of KM in Hewlett Packard, Buckman Labs and American Management Systems are provided, and references of several others where interesting KM projects are currently going on also are included.