Favorite Books about Information and Knowledge Management

books Some time ago a friend asked me to give him a list of my favorite books about information and knowledge management. I emailed them to him, but I'd also like to share my list with you.

I'd like to hear how this list relates to your favorite IM and KM books. If you would recommend other books, please leave a comment with the title!

Here's my list (in no specific order):

  1. Chun Wei Choo, Information Management for the Intelligent Organization. Basic book on information management.
  2. Thomas Davenport, Thinking for a living. About the characteristics of knowledge work.
  3. Peter Drucker, The Effective Executive. Must read because the term 'knowledge worker' is used in this book for the first time.
  4. John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, The Social Life of Information. Great book stressing that information is social. This is mainstream now, but at the time this book was published it wasn't...
  5. Mathieu Weggeman, Kennismanagement. [Dutch] The Dutch book about knowledge management.
  6. Ikujoro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi, The knowlegde creating company. One of the core books in the knowledge management area. This book made KM mainstream. Their SECI model has been critiqued as too objectivistic and mechanistic. Dave Snowden has fundamental articles on this topic. He also shows that Nonaka related to the concept of ba before the book was published, showing the model wasn't meant as an all-encompassing model for knowledge management.
  7. Kazuo Ichijo and Ikujiro Nonaka, Knowledge Creation and management. An update of the previous book with other authors. Good overview over state-of-affairs of KM. Does not address web 2.0 though.
  8. Harvard Business Review on Knowledge Management. A collection of fundamental articles about KM.
  9. Dave Snowden's work about knowledge management (not in a book yet).
  10. Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams, Wikinomics. Not specifically a book about information and knowledge management. But it is a book about shifts in the way we see and manage information and knowledge.

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