A knowledge organization is a management idea, describing an organization in which people use systems and processes to generate, transform, manage, use, and transfer knowledge-based products and services to achieve organizational goals. Overview From a functional perspective, in a knowledge organization, content (objects, data, information, knowledge, and wisdom) are generated by knowledge workers. Content is captured, organized, and preserved to enable its reuse and leveraging by people and groups other than those who generated it. Infrastructure is in place to enable sharing of content across all elements of an organization and with external partners, as appropriate. Procedures are in place to integrate content from multiple sources and mobilize it to achieve organizational goals and objectives. A learning culture promotes not only individual learning but also results in a shared understanding. Finally, the organization embraces continuous evolutionary change to sustain itself in a constantly changing environment. Simard et al. (2007) described five functions of a knowledge-service organization: generate content transform content into useful products and services preserve and manage content to enable organizational use and external transfer use content to achieve organizational goals transfer content externally, in the form of products and services Functions 1, 3, and 5 are essential and cannot be bypassed. A knowledge organization also links past, present, and future by capturing and preserving knowledge in the past, sharing and mobilizing knowledge today, and knowledge organizations can be viewed from a number of perspectives: their general nature, networks, behavior, human dimensions, communications, intelligence, functions and services. History In the 1970s Peter Drucker (1974) may have been the first to describe knowledge workers and knowledge work. Knowledge is created and used by people. Strassman (1985) described the transformation of work in the electronic age from the standpoint of education and training for managers and employees, human aspects of the working environment, and issues of morale, motivation, privacy, and displacements. In 1990 Charles M. Savage observed that the nature of an organization based on knowledge rather than industrial society notions of land, labor, or capital was not well understood. Mcgee and Prusak (1993) noted that core competencies are not what an organization owns, but rather what it knows. Bartlett (1999) indicates that empowerment is not possible in an autocratic organization, that networks cannot be sustained in fixed hierarchical structure, and that learning is not possible in an environment constrained by rigid policies and procedures. Davenport (1997) used an information ecology