The knowledge management puzzle: Human and social factors in knowledge management

Knowledge management is often seen as a problem of capturing, organizing, a nd retrieving information, evoking notions of data mining, text clustering, databases, and documents. We believe that this view is too simple. Knowled ge is inextricably bound up with human cognition, and the management of kno wledge occurs within an intricately structured social context. We argue tha t it is essential for those designing knowledge management systems to consi der the human and social factors at play in the production and use of knowl edge. We review work-ranging from basic research to applied techniques-that emphasizes cognitive and social factors in knowledge management. We then d escribe two approaches to designing socially informed knowledge management systems, social computing and knowledge socialization.