Effective knowledge management in professional organizations: going by the rules

Knowledge management is ´hot´, still, and for good reason. Knowledge has been recognized as a key resource of organizations, and as such it should be managed. But the elusive nature of knowledge puzzles both managers and management scientists. In this paper, we address two questions that lie at the heart of this puzzle: (1) what constitutes good knowledge management, and (2) how can managers put good knowledge management into practice? By conceptualizing organizational knowledge from two different perspectives-the analytical perspective and the actor perspective-we show that there is no single set of values by which knowledge management can be judged. We contend that, to be effective, knowledge management should be a continuous process of tradeoffs between values, and we propose a set of rules to structure this process while doing justice to both perspectives.