Where Did Knowledge Audits Come From

Beginning in the 1990s, knowledge management practitioners and writers alike systematically forgot or ignored four decades of consistent, solid research (and the development of accompanying management techniques and practices), around the understanding of knowledge as an economic resource, around knowledge creation and diffusion in and between organisations, and around the application and exploitation of knowledge in enterprises. A sampling of knowledge management journal literature from the late 1990s to the late 2000s found that the median citation memory (how far back their references went) was between 1 and 5 years; the closer the literature was to knowledge management’s exuberant “beginning” in the mid-1990s, the shorter the citation memory was (Lambe 2011: 177).