INTRODUCTION
Knowledge and knowledge management is an escalating interest to both practitioners within organizations and to researchers Knowledge management is becoming a core competence thet companies must develop in order to succeed in tomorrow’s dynamic global economy (skyrme and amidom 1998) the importance of leveraging knowledge to increase efficiency and effectiveness within the organization is now widely acknowledged not only among large corporations and small business enterprises but also among educational and supports efforts to gather , sort, transform, record and share knowledge.
Nowadays, many organizations are launching khowledge management initiaives, believing that their well-intended effort will naturally result in the better exploitation of knowledge assets for business benefit managers in organizations are consistently looking for better ways to improve performance and business results by gaining new understandings into the underlying but complex mechanisms of khowledge and khowledge management to govern firm’s effectiveness. Indeed, it has been acknowledge that khowledge management is broad and multi-dimensional and covers most aspects of firm’s activities.Hence to be competitive and successful , firms must create and sustain a balanced intellectual capital portfolio. Managers may need to set broad priorities and integrate the goals of managing intellectual capital and effective knowledge process (wig, 1997)
In addition not only knowledge and knowledge management has been the center of focus and
discursive discourse amongst employers and managers in organizations it has also attracted immense management, information technology, anthropology, sociology, epistemology, psychology, and other disciplines (Quintas, Lefrere and Jones, 1997)
Given the importance of knowledge management and the complexity of its nature, it is timely to try to understand the latest theories underlying knowledge and knowledge management. In an attempt to address this issue, this paper critically examines the latest models of knowledge management and discuss on the assumptions and views of each model. The aim of this paper is to in vestigate the current understanding of the theory and practice of the emerging and existing knowledge management models. Hence, employers or practitioners in organizations can understand their concepts and improved approaches can be developed and applied to organization and to those who need to work and implement knowledge management.