Towards a knowledge management consultation system

Knowledge is a source of competitive advantage but moves towards inter‐organizational collaboration mean that firms must give a high priority to knowledge management to ensure that they obtain maximum benefit from both internally generated and acquired knowledge. Knowledge transfer either to collaborators or internally is performed both on a person‐to‐person basis or more often by machine‐to‐person interaction. While knowledge management has been researched, there is little work that tries to model the fundamental interactions between repositories of knowledge or expertise and those seeking to acquire it. This paper introduces the concept of a knowledge management consultation system. The paper provides a characterization of the structure and functioning of such a system, in particular considering its necessary components, and distinguishes between knowledge, need and the carriers of these components. A model incorporating these components is proposed and an example is used to illustrate the scope and relationship of the components within the model. Implications of the model and its role in a research agenda for organizationally useful knowledge management systems are presented. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.