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Managing the Digital Firm

The term "Knowledge Management" (KM) has been around for a number of years and definitions abound, ranging from technology-oriented approaches to  strategy-oriented views and even holistic frameworks. In this course we conceptualize KM as a business strategy that identifies, organizes, distills and distributes information essential to the business in a way that improves organizational performance and corporate competitiveness.
The KM strategy approach also implies that successful KM solutions support the ability of the organization to quickly react to opportunities and threats from the environment and to produce innovative ideas and turn them into products and services at a quicker pace than the competition.
In order to achieve these goals, KM strategy has to concentrate not only on the storage and re-use of the organizational knowledge, but also on the flow of knowledge between business processes, the interfaces between different organizational units or segments and topics that might provide the highest potential for innovation and competitive advantages - thus they require careful management, include organizational changes and as an enabler, supporting information systems.
There is a wide variety of knowledge management approaches, which include goals related to retaining organizational memory, enhancing collaboration or enabling faster and more transparent decision making. The course is aimed at giving a bird?s-eye view of the current KM practices, but also introduces through cases the typical pitfalls and problems of KM initiatives.    
The course considers Information Technology as an enabler for Knowledge Management solutions and discusses recent advances and changes in this area as well.