Knowledge Management can probably be traced to the sighs of executives such as: "If our employees just knew what our employees know, we would be an excellent company".

This does indeed express one very important phenomenon: in every of organization of even moderate size there is lots of knowledge in the heads of people ("corporate memory") that is not only not known by others, but others don't even know that it exists. However, if such knowledge were available, lots of duplication, of problems when employees are sick or leave the organisation, much learning based on past experiences, etc. would be possible. Thus, techniques for collecting, nurturing and sharing knowledge are of increasing importance in just about any organisation.

In the world of the Internet with its variety of formats, lack of structure and missing or non-standardized meta data this is still a dream, but a dream that only in the very long run  will become true. In closed Intranets, however, the situation is much more promising.

In this talk it is shown how information can be collected unobtrusively from persons in an organisation; how this information can be turned into knowledge; and how it can again be made available when needed, even in the absence of explicit requests from users.

More specifically, we will first show how and what kind of knowledge can be obtained from persons within an organisation without increasing their workload, how systemic actions can increase such knowledge, and how we can and have to move away from passive information system and passive data bases that work by request only to "active environments": in such systems, documents can answer any question asked, and information is provided on a personalized level when applicable without requiring requests by its users.

We mention a number of existing applications, mention a number of pitfalls, ways to overcome them. We also comment on the failure of some attempts and how minimalist approaches have saved projects in a number of cases where the "grand scheme" did not work out, e.g. because heavy employee resistance was encountered.

Using screen shots we prove that indeed active environments e.g. based on systems like Hyperwave (www.hyperwave.com) exist.

We conclude the talk by arguing that our society, not just individual organisations, will be changed dramatically as the tools for knowledge management keep increasing and that eventually life without knowledge management will become inconceivable.