...capability (Takeishi Teece 1997). To be successful, firms must not only exploit their existing knowledge, but must also invest in continually exploring new knowledge as strategic options for future strategies and competitive advantage (Sambamurthy et al. 2003).

The centrality of knowledge in firms is reflected in the emergence of the knowledge-based view (Conner and Prahalad 1996) as an important theoretical stance in contemporary organizational research. Theoretical proposals indicate that advantages for a firm arise from cooperative social contexts that are conducive to the creation, coordination, transfer, and integration of knowledge distributed among its employees, business units, and business partners (Ghoshal and Moran 1996). Others have suggested that the sources of competitive advantage have migrated from being based on economies of scale to being based on economies of expertise that are derived by leveraging knowledge distributed in the organization's network through intraorganizational and interorganizational relationships (Subramani and Venkatraman 2003).

Knowledge is a complex concept and a number of factors determine the nature of knowledge creation, management, valuation, and sharing (Nonaka 1994). Drawing from prior discussions, we distinguish knowledge from data and information and view knowledge as a "fluid mix of framed experience, values, contextual information and expert insight that provide[s] a framework for evaluation and incorporating new experiences and information" (Davenport and Prusak 1997, p. 5). Knowledge can be either tacit or explicit; this attribute is also expressed as the distinction between knowing and knowledge (Brown and Duguid 1998; Cook and Brown 1999). Tacit knowledge refers to knowledge that has a personal quality that makes it hard to articulate or communicate or analogously, the knowing or the deeply rooted know-how that emerges from action in a particular context. In contrast, explicit knowledge refers to the codifiable component that can be disembodied and transmitted, a notion analogous to knowledge, the know-what that can be extracted from the knowledge holder and shared with other individuals. Further, knowledge can be conceived as existing at multiple levels--not only at the individual level but also at the group and organizational levels.

Organizational knowledge is created through cycles of combination, internalization, socialization, and externalization that transform knowledge between tacit and explicit modes (Nonaka 1994). In this dynamic process of knowledge creation, linkages between individuals and groups sharing similar tasks, i.e., the communities of practice (Brown and Duguid 1991), play an important role in communicating, sharing, and integrating knowledge. Individual communities have their own unique and context-specific vocabularies that, while facilitating knowledge exchange within the community, impede communication between them. The overlapping of understanding provided by boundary objects spanning multiple communities (Boland and Tenkasi 1995) provides a basis for communicating, sharing, resolving, and combining disparate perspectives. These issues thus have an important bearing on the choice of information systems to accomplish the access and deployment of knowledge in different contexts. How should firms marshall their intra-organizational and interorganizational cooperative contexts to facilitate the sharing, integration, and utilization of knowledge?

Knowledge management is of particular relevance to IS research because the functionalities of information technologies play a critical role in shaping organizational efforts for knowledge creation, acquisition, integration, valuation, and use. Information systems have been central to firm...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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