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 Knowledge Management
Knowledge Management
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"The only thing that gives an organization a competitive edge
— the only thing that is sustainable — is what it knows,
how it uses what it knows, and how fast it can know something new! "
Larry Prusak
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Knowledge management (KM) coordinates the processes of capturing, organizing, storing and distributing information within an enterprise to make it available to others. This access to information is designed to go beyond databases and document repositories to also include the experiences of workers and teams through communication and collaboration technologies. KM seeks to deliver information in a manner that makes it actionable — to dynamically convert information into knowledge. Making information actionable is ultimately a human process, not simply a machine process.
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In the Cognitive Design Model, Knowledge Management provides context and resources for both E-Learning and Performance Support. It provides an information-rich environment that allows information access, information-on- demand, knowledge capture and transfer, and establishment of a collaborative knowledge- sharing community. |
Amrit Tiwana, a well-known author in the field of KM suggests the following definition of Knowledge Management:
Management of business, customer, and process knowledge and its application for adding value and competitively differentiating product and service offering.
Essential Guide to Knowledge Management:
E-Business and CRM Applications (2001)
The Delphi Group has proposed that knowledge management is:
the ability of an organization to leverage collective wisdom to increase responsiveness and innovation.
The American Productivity and Quality Center (APQC) offers the following:
Knowledge Management is the broad process of locating, organizing, transferring, and using the information and expertise within an organization. The overall knowledge management process is supported by four key enablers: leadership, culture, technology, and measurement.
American Productivity and Quality Center
The KMNetwork states:
"Knowledge Management caters to the critical issues of organizational adaptation, survival, and competence in face of increasingly discontinuous environmental change.... Essentially, it embodies organizational processes that seek synergistic combination of data and information processing capacity of information technologies, and the creative and innovative capacity of human beings."
WWW Virtual Library on Knowledge Management
From these views it is clear that KM can take diverse forms and involve numerous organizational processes."Collective wisdom" involves many people with the widest diversity of experience, knowledge and skills. Organizational memory and wisdom is acquired and expresses in both formal and informal ways. Therefore, when KM is applied to different departments or contexts the role and effect of KM differs. There are no universal procedures or magic formulas to achieve KM.
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 — building community and enterprise identity at a deeper more integrated level. The tools needed to accomplish this include such items as:
- E-mail communication and corporate intranet portal linking up all members of an organization to common resources (IT infrastructure)
- Knowledge repositories
- Expertise access tools
- E-Learning resources and applications
- Discussion & chat (asynchronous technologies)
- Online virtual meetings (synchronous interaction technologies)
- Search and data mining tools
For productivity to occur, knowledge must move through an organization via such activities as communication, search & retrieval, collaboration, workflow automation, and sharing of best practices. Bureaucratic structures block the flow of this information and knowledge. They fragment and fixate organizational memory and learning. In so doing they create an enterprise environment that lacks responsiveness to customer needs and resistance to change that undermines healthy adaptation.
In contrast to this, KM structures — such as, knowledge resources, tools, platforms, social networks, and practices — are designed to cross artificial boundaries and dynamically integrate the enterprise. The goal is to make the enterprise agile, and provide specific catalysts for new innovation and creativity. They establish a knowledge-rich environment that makes rapid adaptation to market changes and responsiveness to customer needs possible.
In this way, KM seeks to support the most fundamental needs of the enterprise: effective decision-making, planning, strategy selection, better execution of business processes, and continuous improvement of the organization — ultimately leading to higher productivity and the generation of new knowledge.
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Levels
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Technology Role
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Purpose
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| Data |
Collect data |
Data processing |
| Information |
Integrate and summarize information |
Information Management
(decision making) |
| Knowledge |
Knowledge discovery, creation, and retrieval |
Knowledge Management
(problem solving) |
What Is
Knowledge Management? |
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