Developing the core principles of responsible knowledge management (rKM): Section 2.1 – The emergence & evolution of knowledge management

This article is Section 2.1 of Chapter 2 of a series featuring my Master’s thesis The Emerging Concept of Responsible Knowledge Management (rKM): Identifying and Formulating the Core Principles of rKM.

The origins of knowledge management (KM) do not follow the arc of a typical invention story. There is no single point of origin, no definitive moment of emergence. Instead, KM is best understood as a field that came into being through a convergence of needs, ideas, and technological capabilities. As Lambe suggests¹, KM’s arrival “as a new organisational tool” in the 1990s was less a birth than a renaissance, a recloaking of consultants’, technologists’ and conference organisers’ expertise in management literature.

Indeed, many of the foundational ideas associated with KM predate the ‘field’ itself. Lambe notes that the intellectual roots of KM stretch back to early public policy management, economics, and sociology of the 1960s, where the question of how to organise knowledge for retrieval and use had already been deeply explored. Yet by the time KM gained traction in the managerial lexicon of the 1990s, these early contributions had faded from view. What brought some of them back into focus was a shift in organisational consciousness: a growing recognition that competitive advantage resided not only in material resources and strategy, but in how effectively knowledge could be mobilised².

Koenig and Neveroski chart this reawakening³ in close alignment with advances in information technology. They explain that the initial ‘second’ wave of KM in the early 1990s struggled with systems that attempted to contain all the elusive information scattered within an organisation. The promise of KM was clear: if information could be captured, structured, and stored, then knowledge, long treated as intangible, might finally be made manageable. Early KM efforts thus leaned heavily on IT solutions, focused on codifying, databases, intranets, and document repositories. The aim of this endeavour was to keep track of best practices and lessons learned.

But the promise soon met its limits. What this early, technology-focused approach overlooked were the human and cultural dimensions that brought content and context to the information. As organisations implemented KM systems, it became increasingly clear that the most valuable knowledge often resided not in documents but in interactions. Knowledge creation and sharing began to take place in communities of practice. This realisation marked a subtle but profound turning point. KM began to shift from capturing knowledge to enabling its flow.

The third focus in the early 2000s was content management: metadata and taxonomies, i.e. the retrievability of⁴ what is known⁵. Organisations began to think about the tools that allowed for better structure, description, and arrangement of their documents and digital content. This shift is associated with the broader principles of content management lifecycles, in ensuring that retrievable knowledge is also relevant and up to date⁶. While this phase may seem more administrative, it brought issues like findability and user accessibility to the forefront.

The fourth and most recent phase, according to Koenig and Neveroski, extends the knowledge collection parameters further. With the rise of extranets and shared digital workspaces, KM practices began to include partners, clients, and external stakeholders. This outward turn reflects a growing understanding that organisational knowledge ecosystems are not closed; they depend on flows of information and expertise across institutional lines.

Recently, also technologies such as social media, multimedia sharing, cloud storage, big data, and AI have begun to be leveraged⁷. These tools enable crowd-sourced content, mobile knowledge sharing, and personalised knowledge dissemination that extend the KM system well beyond the boundaries of any single organisation. KM, in this sense, has evolved from an internal support function into a tool for networked value creation.

This brief genealogy shows that KM has repeatedly reshaped itself in response to shifting organisational needs and technological possibilities. Yet each wave has tended to foreground particular aspects of knowledge while leaving others in the background. Recognising these shifting emphases helps clarify what KM has accomplished and what kinds of questions about knowledge it has left unanswered.

Next part: Section 2.2 – A field or fields? The ongoing struggle to define KM.

Article source: Koskinen, H. M. (2025). The Emerging Concept of Responsible Knowledge Management (rKM): Identifying and Formulating the Core Principles of rKM. (Master’s Thesis, LUT University).

Header image source: Created by Hanna M. Koskinen using ChatGPT.

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