Overview
The New Edge in Knowledge: How Knowledge Management Is Changing the Way We Do Business is a practical guide to making knowledge flow across an organization. Carla O'Dell and Cindy Hubert treat knowledge management as an operating discipline rather than a document repository: the aim is to help people find expertise, reuse proven practices, solve problems together, and apply what the organization already knows.
Written as social networks, mobile devices, and collaborative platforms were changing workplace communication, the book connects newer tools with established practices such as communities of practice, best-practice transfer, expertise location, and measurement. Technology expands the routes through which knowledge can travel, but the authors repeatedly bring the problem back to management choices: which business problems matter, what behavior should change, who will govern the work, and how value will be demonstrated.
Real-world cases from APQC's work give the book the character of an implementation manual. It addresses the resistance that often stops knowledge from moving—organizational silos, knowledge hoarding, and the belief that useful ideas must be invented locally—and describes how leadership, roles, funding, culture, and measurement make a KM program durable.
Key ideas
- Start with the work, not the platform. Knowledge management earns support when it improves a recognizable business outcome rather than merely creating another place to store files.
- Put knowledge in the flow of work. People are more likely to contribute and reuse knowledge when the practice fits the decisions and tasks they already perform.
- Create clear governance. Core teams, business-unit participation, funding, and ownership determine whether a program becomes part of the organization or remains a temporary initiative.
- Combine networks with reusable content. A good system helps employees find both a useful record and a person who can supply context.
- Measure adoption and impact. Activity counts alone are weak evidence; managers also need signals that knowledge reuse improves speed, quality, cost, or decision-making.
Why it matters for handovers
A handover is a small but consequential knowledge-management program. It must connect a business need—the continuity of a role—to the records, experts, relationships, and practices that will let someone else perform it. A folder of files is only one part of that system.
For Flamekeeper, the strongest lesson is to keep capture close to real work. Prompts should ask about decisions, exceptions, trusted contacts, and reusable examples. Managers should then turn gaps into concrete follow-up actions and verify that the successor can find and apply what was transferred.
Questions to carry into a handover
- Which recurring decisions would become slower or riskier if the departing employee were unavailable tomorrow?
- Where does the team need a reusable record, and where does it need access to a person or community?
- Who will own each knowledge asset after the transition, and how will the team know it is still useful?
About the authors
Carla O'Dell and Cindy Hubert wrote the book from long experience at APQC, a nonprofit benchmarking and best-practices organization. O'Dell served as APQC's president and became a prominent practitioner and author in knowledge management. Hubert led APQC delivery services and worked with hundreds of organizations applying KM methods. Their perspective is therefore grounded in implementation across many companies rather than in a single technology or industry.