CHAPTER I
THE PROBLEM AND ITS SETTING

Introduction According to the Oxford Dictionary, knowledge consists of the facts, information, and skills acquired by a person through experience or education, the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject. Knowledge has its distinction with data and information in the context of information systems. Data are collection of facts and figures which relay something specific but which are not organized in any way and which provide no further information regarding patterns and context. For data to become information, it must be contextualized, categorized, calculated and condensed (Davenport & Prusak, 2000). Information thus paints a bigger picture; it is data with relevance and purpose. It may convey a trend in the environment, or perhaps indicate a pattern of sales for a given period of time. Data, information and knowledge can all be viewed as assets of organizations. Many organizations realize they own a huge amount of knowledge and that this knowledge needs to be managed in order to be useful. There are two types of knowledge: namely explicit and tacit knowledge (Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995). Tacit knowledge was originally defined by Polanyi in 1966. It is sometimes referred to as know-how (Brown & Duguid, 1998) and refers to intuitive, hard to define knowledge that is largely experience based. Tacit knowledge tends to reside within the head of the knowers, whereas explicit knowledge is formalized and codified, and is sometimes referred to as know-what (Brown & Duguid, 1998). It is therefore fairly easy to identify, store and retrieve (Wellman 2009). This type of knowledge most easily handled by Knowledge Management System, which are very effective at facilitating the storage, retrieval, and modification of documents and texts. Knowledge management develops system and processes to acquire and