What is Knowledge Management?
Dimensions & Levels
Knowledge & Understanding
Explicit & Tacit Knowledge
Knowledge Sharing Cycle
Learning & Knowledge
Value Proposition
Strategic Issues
Architecture & Technology
The Benefits
KM References

  Knowledge Management > The Benefits

The Benefits of Knowledge Management

"...the new world of business is characterized by high levels of uncertainty and inability to predict the future. Use of the information and controls systems and compliance with pre-defined goals...
may not necessarily achieve long-term organizational competence... This world needs the capability to understand the problems afresh given the changing environmental conditions. The focus is not only on finding the right answers but on finding the right questions."
Dr. Yogesh Malhortra, The Brint Institue

Infrastructure: Build and maintain infrastructure that serves to capture, organize, and store information and experiences of workers and groups so that these knowledge resources become available to all others within the enterprise.

Since the very nature of certain organizations is "knowledge work," knowledge capacity is integral to the enterprise's success in its mission and purpose. KM infrastructure is a development of an organization's "digital nervous system" to extend beyond communication and coordination into new capacities for collaboration and creativity. IT infrastructure and specific software automation is used to strengthen each KM task in The Knowledge Sharing Cycle.

Best Practices: Build and maintain a system of best practices dedicated to valuing and working with both explicit and tacit knowledge resources.

Since organizational intelligence for collaboration, problem-solving, productivity and innovation depends upon use of explicit and tacit knowledge, KM best practices are an embodiment of an enterprise's evolving organizational intelligence. Agility — an enterprise's ability to respond to internal and external demands — is achieved through a constantly evolving and refinement of best practices that bring out the best in individuals and work groups. Best practices are unburdened from the overhead of bureaucratic tasks and business processes that waste energy and resources.

Corporate Culture: Build and maintain a culture of knowledge sharing which seeks to empower every member of an organization with explicit and tacit knowledge resources, and elicit knowledge contributions and leadership from every level of the enterprise.

A "knowledge sharing" corporate culture is the antithesis of a "knowledge hoarding" culture — in which individuals or work groups believe that their financial, social and political survivability and power is derived by blocking the flow of communication or withholding access to information.

 

Architecture
& Technology
Benefits
of KM

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