Managing for knowledge: HR's strategic role

With remarkable regularity a ?new idea? surfaces in the management community. Often it results from repackaging a long-lived management issue or truth. Conversely, the current vogue, Knowledge Management, is a genuinely new concept. In summary this involves the processes that ensure all the knowledge, explicit and implicit, that exists in the organisation is organised in a way that enables it to be accessed quickly and easily. This allows for distributed decision making so that new actions, products and services can be built from it at a pace that outstrips similar use by others. Knowledge management simultaneously meets the need to make information freely available while also enabling those with full understanding to move swiftly ahead, thereby rendering the earlier knowledge redundant. In today?s fast paced environment, it offers an essential market edge for individuals and for their organisation.