INTRODUCTION

Today, businesses have come to realize that their key asset and only sustainable source of competitive advantage lie in their ability to effectively apply, manage, and utilize organizational knowledge. The digital revolution changes the way companies collect, store, and process data on consumer behavior, and the way marketers determine price, and promote or distribute products. The proliferation of information systems and technology enables companies to accumulate huge amounts of customer data and information. Companies that possess or develop the ability to explore useful marketing insights into customer characteristics and their purchase patterns will be duly rewarded. With the development of the Internet and the budding of dot-coms, knowledge management practices and research in e-commerce are becoming increasingly important. In addition to the dot-coms, many "brick-andmortar" companies are also setting up their e-commerce counterparts in the cyberspace. The changes that are reshaping many businesses in the e-commerce era call for a new paradigm to create, capture, locate, and share knowledge efficiently and effectively.

Literature review
To remain competitive, organizations must efficiently and effectively create, capture, locate, and share their organization's knowledge and expertise, and have the ability

to bring that knowledge to bear on problems and opportunities Newman defined knowledge management as the collection of processes that govern the creation, dissemination, and utilization of knowledge. The theory of knowledge creation distinguishes between tacit and explicit knowledge. Tacit knowledge is difficult to articulate and encode, and consequently difficult to transfer. On the other hand, explicit (documented) knowledge can be communicated or transmitted in formal language. Along the line of tacit and explicit knowledge classification, knowledge management is believed to be "a systemic and organizationally specified process for acquiring, organizing, and communicating both tacit and explicit knowledge" so that work can be made more effective and productive In Holm's (14) view, knowledge management is getting the right information to the right people at the right time, and helping people create knowledge, and share and act upon information in ways that will measurably improve the performance of the organization and its partners. To achieve this, we need a systematic approach to identify and capture information and knowledge about a company's processes, products, services, markets, customers, and competitors, and to share them for the greater goal of organizational well being and performance

A survey of more than 700 U.S. companies revealed that a major portion of an organization's knowledge resides in the employees' brains (tacit knowledge). Only a small portion is in a sharable form (explicit knowledge). Obviously, tacit and explicit knowledge should be handled with different knowledge management strategies. One widely adopted classification of knowledge management strategies recognizes two broad classes of strategies: personalization and codification . The personalization strategy, which recognizes the tacit dimension of knowledge, assumes that knowledge is shared mainly through direct interpersonal communication. The codification strategy, on the other hand, assumes that knowledge can be effectively extracted and codified and thus uses a document-to-person approach where knowledge artifacts are then stored and indexed in databases that enable easy retrieval.

So where does E-Commerce fit into the world of KM?

E-commerce is an important part of the knowledge organization puzzle. There is tremendous amount of information that is contained within each business transaction. But this information is much more that just who bought what and when. Questions such as why they bought are sometimes more important than what they bought or the amount of the transaction. If an organization can determine why each customer bought a particular item, it may be able to determine future trends or new potential markets. To find the answer to why someone bought an item is more than just understanding the information that is housed within the physical transaction. Input from the sales person, customer service

representative and the service technician needs to be made available to those that seek the information. Imagine if the product development and marketing departments had all the knowledge of the front line people (sales, customer service, maintenance, and the customers themselves) and was able to combine it with their own expertise in product planning. How dramatic would that increase future sales? As the graphic below indicates, there are numerous pieces of the knowledge organization. The mission statement and strategic plan of the organization acts as the foundation that everything else is built upon. The company culture and executive support are the pillars that hold the organization in place and provide the framework for the tools (such as e-commerce) that facilitate communication of the explicit documents (the content) of the company. The employee knowledge (the tacit information) and their experiences rest on top of the building and utilize technology to enable greater knowledge sharing.

Figure #1 - The Knowledge Organization

Others have said knowledge management is nothing more than information management. But information is only a subset of knowledge, just as data is a subset of information. Information becomes knowledge when it is acted upon. A quote that can act as a lighthouse for navigation through the knowledge management waters is as follows:

"To conceive of knowledge as a collection of information seems to rob the concept of all its life Knowledge resides in the user and not in the collection. It is how the user reacts to a collection of information that matters." --Churchman (1971). We have to remember what Churchman is saying when discussing knowledge management. Technology is only a piece of the puzzle. Knowledge is not something we can display as a tool or product. It is something we work towards, but will never reach a final destination since it is impossible for an individual organization to know everything about every possible topic and experience. In Thomas Stewart's book, " Intellectual Capital", he tells of the story of Nike being a knowledge company and not a manufacturer. At first, this may sound strange, since many think of Nike as a manufacturer of footwear. But is Nike really a manufacturer? Stewart points out that they are a research and marketing company since they don't own any factories. They use the knowledge within their company to design great sneakers and they use their tremendous marketing talent to sell products made by other companies to their specifications. Other than their corporate offices and real estate, they don't own physical assets such as factories to make the products they sell. The real value of their company is their knowledge and expertise to design and market products, not manufacture them. Their physical assets are a much smaller part of their total worth.

A Knowledge Map Since it is impossible to store all the information within a company, particularly the tacit information of the people, knowing where to find more information that can be turned into knowledge is key. The reality is that knowledge is in the individual and not the explicit property that can be captured. Many times knowing the location of where to find more information is all someone needs. How many times have you heard statements similar to the following: "Joe used to work for the ABC Company, so maybe he knows about their pricing structure." A knowledge map provides a "directory" of where to find the experts and information within a company. Creating a knowledge map can be as simple or as complex as you want it to be. The available resources and the value that a company places on knowledge management will be a determining factor. Although it would be ideal to have everyone in a company enter into a computer everything they know about anything that may in anyway relate to a company's business. Not only is this unrealistic, but extremely unproductive since how much of this knowledge would actually be used and when? By the time most things are identified and captured, it will

be outdated and unless. So instead of capturing the information, just provide a pointer to where the information is located. The seeker can then determine if the search is worth the effort. In most organizations, if the "competitive information file" should include a pointer or reference to other resources (i.e. Joe), more information could be gathered that could later be turned into knowledge for the seeker.

Conclusion
As can be seen, there are many pieces that are needed to evolve towards becoming a Knowledge Organization. The move from the industrial age to the knowledge age and the creation of more companies like Nike or Microsoft who rely more on brains physical factory output will be leading the charge. Since knowledge management is a practice and knowledge never stops growing, there is no such thing as a completed KM project. A final destination will never be accomplished since new knowledge and experiences are continually added and refined and outside forces can create a change in corporate strategy. But it is those companies that lay the

foundation for greater knowledge sharing now, that will be the leaders of tomorrow. See, Knowledge Management really is much more than Document Management.