Context

Knowledge management's rise to prominence reflects a widespread recognition that fundamental changes are taking place in the way companies do business, with regard to their internal organisation and their external relationships with customers, suppliers and competitors. The first phase in the emergence of a knowledge management (KM) market - now drawing to an end (Ovum, 1999) - has been characterised by considerable hype and confusion. In this first phase early adopters followed different approaches to knowledge management with varying emphasis on technology, cultural, organisational and managerial issues. Nevertheless, it is widely acknowledged in the literature that two main strategies for knowledge management have been employed by early adopters of the principle; see e.g. Hansen et al (1999):

• The process-centred approach mainly understands KM as a social communication process. In this approach, knowledge is closely tied to the person who developed it and is shared mainly through person-to-person contacts. The main purpose of IT in this approach is to help people communicate knowledge, not to store it. This approach is also referred to as the 'personalisation' approach.
• The product-centred approach focuses on knowledge documents, their creation, storage and re-use in computer-based corporate memories. This approach is also referred to as 'content-centred' or 'codification' approach.

The LEVER approach is based on the holistic integration of both abovementioned approaches as they have been developed within the KNOW-NET ESPRIT 28928 project. This integration has been accomplished in all constituents of the KNOW-NET solution that includes:

• A holistic conceptual framework that can be used by managers as a roadmap for ensuring integrity of the Knowledge Management effort.
• A KM methodology that helps organisations define and document their KM strategy, audit and design business processes that enhance and facilitate corporate learning, establish related organisational roles, facilitate knowledge sharing between people in the organisation, and explicitly measure and evaluate the quality and business value of the organisation's intellectual capital.
• An intranet-based tool that supports the collection and categorisation of internal and external information, the re-use of stored knowledge using flexible and customisable Knowledge Navigators and advanced search mechanisms that include textual as well as graphical searching, and the collaboration via on-line workspaces that allow people to work together from different locations.

Several organisations claim to have implemented a dual strategy successfully in their knowledge management initiatives. Oracle Consulting, for example (Ovum 1999), explicitly states that it has combined the best principles of both approaches to build its internal knowledge management system. Despite the existence of cases that have been successful in following a dual strategy, and although the need and value of both KM approaches is widely recognised, current thinking in the KM community is indicating that trying to straddle both approaches to an equal degree is risky, and can quickly undermine a knowledge management imitative, because it can be overwhelming (in terms of resources and organisational and cultural changes needed).

The LEVER proposal aims to overrule this line of thinking by applying to the user organisations a knowledge management solution, unique in the marketplace, which innovatively fuses the process-centric approach with the product-centric approach.

Such an integrated solution ensures that both approaches can inter-operate, in the sense that they are not isolated from one another and one can make use and add value to the other. Because this fusion exists not only in the technology but also in the whole methodological approach (starting from the strategic planning, and ending to the measurement system utilised) it will safely support the LEVER user organisations in implementing state of the art KM solutions without the risks faced by early adopters, that in the absence of an integrated solution, were prone to fail when chosen to follow a dual strategy.