Aim

The principal aim of this survey is to investigate the current understanding around the Knowledge Management phenomenon in relation to the basic constructs of the proposed KMinPractice methodology.

Definitions

This section provides the definitions of terms used in the context of the survey.

Knowledge is a special enterprise resource consisting of the dynamic mixture of subjective beliefs, experiences and insights of employees and the corporate know-how, along with their informational representations that constantly interact in order to support efficient entrepreneurial behavior and action and thus add value to the enterprise.

Knowledge Management (KM) can be defined as the systematic and planned organizational practice that aims to create an internal environment that fosters knowledge in support of the value adding activities. The ultimate goal is to increase individual effectiveness and corporate competitiveness and performance.

A Knowledge Management Systems (KMS) is defined as any technological solution or the aggregate of discrete tools in support of the efficient articulation of corporate knowledge as well as, the effective storage and direct or indirect distribution of information in ways that contribute to business goals, innovation, and learning.

The categories of software tools that comprise Knowledge Management Systems include (Maier, 2002):

• Intranet infrastructures providing basic functionality for communication, as well as, storing, exchanging, searching and retrieving of data and documents
• Document and content management systems handling electronic documents or Web content respectively
• Workflow management systems supporting the execution of well defined workflows
• Artificial intelligence technologies supporting search and retrieval of distributed knowledge, user profile management, text and Web mining,
• Business intelligence tools and data warehouses, supporting the transformation of fragmented organizational and competitive data into goal-oriented information
• Visualization tools assisting the relationships between knowledge, people and processes,
• Groupware tools supporting time management, discussions, meetings or creative workshops of work groups and teams, and finally
• E-learning systems supporting the teaching and/or learning process, by offering learning content to employees in an interactive way and thus.

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