Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to report the results of an exploratory investigation of the organizational impact of knowledge management (KM).Design/methodology/approach -A search of the literature revealed 12 KM practices whose performance impact was assessed via a survey of business organizations.Findings -KM practices were found to be directly related to organizational performance which, in turn, was directly related to financial performance. There was no direct relationship found between KM practices and financial performance. A different set of KM practices was associated with each value discipline (i.e. customer intimacy, product development and operational excellence). A gap exists between the KM practices that firms believe to be important and those that were directly related to organizational performance.Research limitations/implications -The majority of the research constructs were formative, thus improving the measurement of KM practices will prove vital for validating and extending these findings. The findings were based solely on organizations from North America and Australia and may not reflect KM practices in other geographic, economic or cultural settings.Practical implications -This study encourages practitioners to focus their KM initiatives on specific intermediate performance outcomes.Originality/value -The paper examines the relationship between KM practices and performance outcomes. It was expected that a direct relationship between KM practices and organizational performance would be observed. It was also expected that organizational performance would mediate the relationship between KM practices and financial performance. These expectations were supported. KM practices showed a direct relationship with intermediate measures of organizational performance, and organizational performance showed a significant and direct relationship to financial performance. There was no significant relationship found between KM practices and financial performance.

Changes in the knowledge and skill requirements of information systems (IS) positions were examined by analyzing the content of advertisements for IS professionals placed in four major newspapers over the 20-year period 1970-1990. Three types of jobs were examined: programmers, systems analysts, and IS managers. The analysis of the frequency of phrases in these advertisements suggests that job ads for programmers have changed very little-technical requirements remain high, and business and systems knowledge requirements remain relatively low (although the frequency of mention of business requirements has increased somewhat). IS management positions are also relatively stable (as reflected in the makeup of job ads) from the standpoint that business knowledge requirements have remained high, with technical and systems requirements specified less frequently. The greatest transition in specified job requirements over this 20-year period has occurred for systems analysts. Although this is perhaps not surprising, the nature of this transition is. Contrary to expectations, the relative frequency and proportion of stated technical knowledge.requirements in ads have increased dramatically, while the relative frequency of business and systems knowledge requirements has actually decreased slightly. These results raise questions concerning the implicit understanding by academics and practitioners alike of the need for business knowledge on the part of systems analysts end other IS professionals. Various interpretations of these findings are provided, and the implications for both education and recruitment are discussed.

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Enterprise content management (ECM) is an integrated approach to managing all of an organization's information including paper documents, data, reports, web pages, and digital assets. ECM includes the strategies, tools, processes, and skills an organization needs to manage its information assets over their lifecycle. While many vendors would suggest that their software is a panacea, most knowledge managers recognize the greater challenge-to develop an overall ECM strategy that will ensure good information practices are in place and effectively integrated with technology where appropriate. An effective ECM strategy should address each of the four lifecycle stages: 1. Capture-all activities associated with collecting content. 2. Organize-indexing, classifying and linking content and databases together to provide access within and across business units and functions. 3. Process-sifting and analyzing content in ways that inform decision-making. 4. Maintain-ensuring that content is kept up-to-date. A guiding principle at all stages is flexibility. Methods of collecting, organizing, processing and maintaining content that "casts it in concrete" could become a liability in the near future. While the top-down vision for ECM includes improved decision-making, better utilization of information and the collection of competitive intelligence, most ECM initiatives take a bottom-up approach that focuses on delivering immediate benefits through projects such as intranet portals, information searching, and web content management. However, knowledge managers also recognize that greater value can be gained from taking a more strategic approach to ECM. The research shows that those organizations that can marry effective content stewardship practices with appropriate information behaviors and values and information technology on a broader scale can have a significant effect on their organization's performance.

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