“Knowledge is different from all other resources. It makes itself constantly obsolete, so that today’s advanced knowledge is tomorrow’s ignorance.

The increased use of collaboration and social media to support

business process management (BPM) focus exclusively upon repeatable, predictable kinds

while it has roots in both content and process, it is enhanced by new technologies that enable dynamic, adaptive workflows to inform the design of real-world, people-oriented solutions.

performed—one size does not fit all. The former statement spotlights the traditional gap between business and IT understanding, and the latter is the way all IT projects should be approached.

With this approach, knowledge workers and management establish specific goals or objectives within the organization so that the outcome is mutually understood, but the specific course of actions and decision making is left to the knowledge worker.

This is the orientation that frames our definition of ACM used throughout this book: Systems that are able to support decision making and data capture while providing the freedom for knowledge workers to apply their own understanding and subject matter expertise to respond to unique or changing circumstances within the business environment. In many

This description sounds an awful lot like enterprise content management (ECM) on steroids:

Thomas Davenport (2005) in his book Thinking for a Living defines knowledge workers: “Knowledge workers have high degrees of expertise, education, or experience, and the primary purpose of their jobs involves the creation, distribution, or application of knowledge.” The opposite of knowledge work might be called “routine work.” Routine work is well