KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT

Knowledge Management (KM) is defined as the process of creation, capture, organizing, accessing and using knowledge to create customer/user value.

Knowledge and Information

There is a tendency among people to use the word knowledge and information interchangeably as if they are synonymous. Knowledge consists of Truths & beliefs, perspectives & concepts, judgments & expectations, methodologies & know-how. Knowledge is accumulated, organized, integrated and held over long periods. Information consists of facts, figures and data that are organized to describe a particular situation or problem. From the descriptions, it is very evident that knowledge and Information mean different things, though they are related.

The knowledge is of two types; Tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge.

Tacit knowledge:

Tacit Knowledge not easily visible or expressible and is highly personable. Subjective insights, intuitions, hunches, gut feeling etc form part of tacit knowledge. It is deeply rooted in an individual’s actions and experience.

Explicit knowledge:

Explicit Knowledge is formal and systematic; which can be expressed in words and numbers; which can be easily communicated and shared. Hard data, scientific formulae, patents, codified procedures, universal principle etc forms part of the explicit knowledge.

The interaction between these two forms of knowledge provides the understanding required for knowledge creation, elicitation and capture

Why knowledge management is required in organizations?

In an intense, open, global and dynamic world environment, new ideas and processes are increasingly becoming focal point of competition. Organizations able to reach the users faster more efficiently with products and services that are well matched with the needs of the consumer benefit from competitive advantage. Thus an organization’s ability to learn and innovate faster than the competition may be the greatest sustainable competitive advantage. This underlines the utmost requirement of knowledge management in organizations & companies.

When does it become necessary to have knowledge management in place?

• When the employees leave, what percentage of knowledge of the organization goes out with them?
• How quickly can expertise be assimilated in a new organization?
• How can organizations reap big returns without reinventing the wheel every time?
• When organizations undergo re-structuring, can it be ensured that the knowledge does not disappear with it?
• When expanding the businesses, can it be done without losing the organizational culture, core values, systems & knowledge?

If these questions frequent in the mind, it is proof that organization severely need knowledge management in place.

Knowledge Management Process:

• Create new knowledge
• Capture tacit knowledge in explicit form (make individual knowledge available across organization)
• Organize knowledge (classify, categorize, store, retrieve & maintain knowledge)
• Access knowledge (making knowledge available to the requester)
• Use knowledge (in work activities, decision making and other opportunities)

Role of Information Technology in Knowledge Management:

Information forms an integral component of Knowledge. Therefore, it is essential to understand the usage of technology in the knowledge management practices. Information technology plays a vital role in capturing, organizing and retrieving and sharing knowledge. IT and the digital nervous system (IT hardware, software, connectivity & applications) has come to stay as the real means of information & knowledge creation, capture, managemnt & sharing. Without IT, Information & knowledge manageent would have stayed at its primitive level. A prime example of this case would the Genome project in which DNA structure was revealed in the ‘book of life’ It was all about concurrent and collaborative research happening in laboratories located in almost all continents being accessed and shared by the scientific community in such a fast pace that the whole project got over successfully almost five years before the scheduled time of its end. And what a breakthrough research it was!

Critical Success Factors in Knowledge Management

• Have a knowledge sharing culture in organization
• Have a proper document management system in place
• Have dedicated knowledge people
• Have a measurement system for KM success.

How to measure the success of KM

It is difficult to measure as it is quite new, but look for trends in:

• Reduction in response time to user queries
• Greater clarity of approach in problem solving
• Reduction in normal innovation cycle and thus time to market
• Saving of labour hours
• Saving of Investment

The successful enterprise of tomorrow will be the one having a proper KM network in place and will be able to put knowledge at the frontiers of innovation and customer service

Myths about KM

• KM should be assigned to a separate Department - Untrue, Everyone in the organization must have a responsibility in promoting KM.
• KM means a good information system -Untrue, Information system is just a tool to ensure success of KM. By itself, it is not KM
• Once initiated, KM will happen automatically- Untrue, KM needs continuous monitoring and nurturing.

Benefits of KM

• Reduction of paper handling and error-prone manual processes
• Reduction of paper storage
• Reduction of lost documents
• Faster access to information
• Online access to information that was formerly available only on paper, microfilm etc
• Improved control over documents and document-oriented processes
• Streamlining of time-consuming business processes
• Security over document access and modification
• Provide reliable and accurate audit trail
• Improved tracking and monitoring, with the ability to identify bottlenecks and modify the system to improve efficiency

Knowledge Management - Benifits to India:

• Better quality of technical education and therefore better employability
• Increase in literary rate of the country
• Bringing health facilities to the rural population
• Improving food production and post production efficiency
• Enormous saving in R&D spending
• Improving national and local governance
• Reduction in poverty, child labour and corruption

Conclusion

Knowledge Management emerged as a scientific discipline in early 90s. It was initially supported by only practitioners mostly in industries. Later, the ideas were taken up by academics and the pioneering institutions were Hitotsubashi University, Japan, Babson College & New York University. In 2001, Thomas Stewart, former editor at Fortune Magazine, published a cover story highlighting the importance of intellectual capital of organizations. Since its establishment, the KM discipline has been gradually moving towards academic maturity. The core components of KM include People, Processes, Culture, Structure & Technology. Varied schools of thought on Knowledge management exists today and once the KM discipline reaches academic maturity, we expect these to converge and then we would see highest levels of its proliferation, thereby bringing tremendous benefits and advantages to the practitioners.