SUMMARY – “The benefits of sketching for knowledge management”

By Inggrid Amelia Farandi

BACKGROUND
The literature survey is based on a search for the title term "sketching" on the ISI Web of Knowledge online database, from which 406 articles were found on March 21, 2011. After topic filtering and eliminating all articles where sketching was used in the sense of a project proposal or a theoretical sketch, there were only 48 articles left related to the keyword "sketching". Based on the awareness of important contributions in the field of sketching, which did not appear in their database search, the inclusion criteria was extended to include grey or conference literature and examined the reference sections of highly cited articles.

ISSUE OR PROBLEM
Knowledge management (KM) can be considered to have at least partly grown out of the understanding that the mere reliance on information management infrastructures is probably not sufficient to enable organizations to utilize their intellectual capital effectively. While modern knowledge management applications (such as contextaware applications or collaborative filtering systems) are an important element to solve many knowledge management challenges (such as the on-demand retrieval of experiences codified in documents), it is not a panacea for all knowledge-related problems that companies face today. Many genuine KM problems - such as enabling teams to use all of their members' expertise when solving a problem - cannot solely rely on IT-based solutions, as these may be too demanding in terms of the required infrastructure or budget, or simply require too many training efforts to unleash their full potential. At times, IT-based KM technology may even distract knowledge workers from the tasks that they should focus on. A Gartner study found for example that those companies that had put into place knowledge