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1 Introduction
Knowledge is central to the strategy and operations of most organisations in the energy sector, and comes in many different forms - whether it is scientific knowledge (petroleum chemistry), technological knowledge (how to run generator sets efficiently), or management knowledge (how to motivate your staff to introduce new operating practices). Even at the extraction end of the value chain, where competitive advantage might be based on simple availability of a resource, there is still a need for scientific and technological knowledge just to operate successfully.
Managing the knowledge in an organisation, at least as an implicit activity, is almost certainly as old as organisation themselves. The term "knowledge management" (KM) was coined in the 1980s by Karl Wiig, and became popular as a recognised field of study in the 1990s, partly as a result of books such as those by [61] Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995) and [23] Davenport and Prusak (1998). Nevertheless, the roots of KM as an explicit activity go much further back than that, and may be seen in the fields of expert/knowledge-based systems, organisational learning and the study of business processes, to name but three.
The aim of this paper is to review both the literature on KM and the practice of KM in the energy sector, and to offer some views about possible future directions. In order to do that, it will also be necessary to explain some of the key general KM concepts. What we shall see is that some parts of the energy sector are amongst the leaders in KM, especially oil and gas field exploration and development, and the operation of electricity generating plants, but other parts of the sector show little awareness of KM. Interestingly, some activities labelled within the energy sector as KM appear to be going on without being informed by mainstream KM research and practice at all.
The paper is structured as follows. First, we present some KM concepts. Then, we review examples of KM in the energy sector before going on to draw out the most important current issues and themes, We then close by drawing some conclusions and identifying future directions for research and implementation.
2 KM concepts
In this section, we review the most important general KM concepts,...