From tacit knowledge to knowledge management: leveraging invisible assets

Abstract Within competitive advantage considerations, knowledge has emerged as one of the more strategic, although invisible, assets for organizations. This is notwithstanding a wider and specifically economistic and cognitive discounting of knowledge as a factor of production — largely ignoring the socially constructed and socially mediated nature of knowledge. Intellectual capabilities and knowledge/information transformations now have a central place within globalizing information economies. Constructing, transforming and commodifying knowledge and information require new organizational understandings and newer cognitive capabilities of strategic management praxis. Part of this cognitive awareness is a deliberate organizational designing for the role of symbolic analysts. As well, there is an emerging need for the Chief Knowledge Officer function going well beyond the Chief Information Officer requirements posited…