A Process for Delivering Information Just in Time

Over the last three decades, the idea of just-in-time manufacturing, with its emphasis on quality improvement, streamlining processes, and reducing inventories, has revolutionized manufacturing operations across the industrial world. While there are many interrelated elements in just-in-time manufacturing, the idea’s success in producing goods has led others to apply the same ideas in services, and more recently, to knowledge management. In this paper, I explore the analogy implied by the idea of delivering knowledge “just-in-time” and argue that this necessarily requires a process-oriented approach to knowledge management.