The Rise of the Knowledge Organization

Abstract

The progress of humanity has been predominantly due to the effectiveness of organizations to achieve human pursuits. Organizations have always made use of knowledge and technology to survive. With the rise of large corporations in the early twentieth century came a strong interest in research in management and organizational theory. The awareness of the importance of information and knowledge, followed by a constant search for ways to create, store, integrate, tailor, share, and make available the right knowledge to the right people at the right time, led to the birth of knowledge management in the 1990s. Knowledge organizations, currently in their embryonic form, focus on networking and knowledge creation, sharing, and application. The ultimate challenge of the future is to liberate and amplify the knowledge and creativity of all organizational members, which will enable the rise of the knowledge organization.