How Google And AI Upended 1990s Knowledge Management

Managing knowledge is not a new idea. Ancient civilizations made strenuous efforts to organize, preserve, and disseminate knowledge through libraries and archives, such as the Assyrian Library of Ashurbanipal (7th century BCE, Nineveh) which collected ~30,000 clay tablets on multiple subjects, and the Library of Alexandria (3rd century BCE, Egypt) with 500,000 scrolls cataloged and summarized. These precursors emphasized curation and access, foreshadowing what was to come with modern knowledge sharing systems..

How Knowledge Management Exploded In The 1990s

In the early 1990s, the arrival of the Internet sparked a whole new interest in the possibilities of “managing knowledge.” Leading firms like McKinsey, Ernst & Young, Accenture, and early adopters like Skandia began assembling and capturing knowledge from within the organization. The dominant paradigm involved: