What Knowledge Management is

Learning Objectives

Knowledge is the, principal factor that makes personal, organizational, and societal intelligent behavior possible.
Knowledge management is the process used by organizations to identify and capture information that is valuable to others.

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What Is Knowledge Management?

Knowledge management is a discipline that promotes an integrated approach to the creation, capture, organization, access and use of an organization’s information assets. These assets include structured databases, textual information such as policy and procedure documents, and most importantly, the tacit knowledge and expertise resident in the heads of individual employees.

KM is not the implementation of a technology; rather, it is a multidisciplined approach that integrates project/program strategy, cultural values and work processes. KM programs perform best when enabled with sophisticated and elegant technology, but an emphasis on technology alone will achieve very little progress toward KM; conversely, even the strongest KM culture that is not supported with adequate technology also will falter.

Knowledge - the insights, understandings, and practical know-how that we all possess -- is the fundamental resource and scope of all our activities. How can organizations take into account all the knowledge possessed by its employees and manage it for the benefit and survival of all organizational stakeholders – internal and external? Knowledge Management is the key.

Knowledge Management ('KM') comprises a range of practices used by organisations to identify, create, represent, and distribute knowledge for reuse, awareness and learning. Knowledge Management programs are typically tied to organisational objectives and are intended to achieve specific outcomes, such as shared intelligence, improved performance, effective advantage, or higher levels of innovation.

One aspect of Knowledge Management, knowledge transfer, has always existed in one form or another. Examples include on-the-job peer discussions, formal apprenticeship, corporate libraries, professional training and mentoring programs. However, with computers becoming more widespread in the second half of the 20th century, specific adaptations of technology such as knowledge bases, expert systems, and knowledge repositories have been introduced to further simplify the process.

The three fundamental changes that drive KM are the increasing value of highly capable people, rising job complexity, and the universal availability of information.

Increasing Value of Highly Capable People, (Knowledge Workers)
Job Complexity: Jobs have evolved from management-directed, specific assignments with documented tasks, to self-directed, flexible assignments that involve generating new ideas, simplifying complexity into feasible processes, and synthesizing masses of information into informed decisions and actions.
Universal Availability of, and Desire for, Knowledge: Technology advances and popularization of the Internet have stimulated human intellect and the desire for knowledge by making digitally stored information almost universally available. However, two issues persist. First, the volume of digital information is massive, and to render it useful enterprises must identify and separate the high-value, high-utility data from the low-value data. Second, the higher-value information (i.e., the intellectual knowledge of people and undefined job activities) is largely uncaptured and exists only in the minds of the experts. Enterprises must create a culture and a technical environment where knowledge is convertible to digital form.

See Knowledge Workers and Learning Organizations ; Recruitment: How to Attract Knowledge Workers

Knowledge Asset Management

Most traditional organization policies and controls focus on the tangible assets of the organization and leave unmanaged their important knowledge assets. Advanced organizations are realizing how important it is to ``know what they know'' and be able to make maximum use of the knowledge. This is their "organizational knowledge asset".

All too often one part of an organization repeats work of another part simply because it is impossible to keep track of, and make use of, knowledge in other parts. Organizations need to know what their organizational knowledge assets are, and how to manage and make use of these assets to get maximum return.

Knowledge assets must be nurtured, preserved, and used to the largest extent possible by both individuals and organizations.

Organizations need to have an organization-wide vocabulary to ensure that the knowledge is correctly understood, to be able to identify, model and explicitly represent their knowledge, and to share and re-use their knowledge among differing applications for various types of users.

The project/programme purpose perspective of KM

The project/programme purpose perspective focuses on why, where, and to what extent the organization must invest in or exploit knowledge. It looks at which strategies, products and services, alliances, acquisitions, or divestments should be considered from knowledge-related points of view.

The management perspective focuses on determining, organizing, directing, and monitoring knowledge-related activities required to achieve the desired project/programme purpose strategies and objectives.

The operational perspective focuses on applying the expertise to conduct explicit knowledge-related work and tasks.

There are seven fundamental principles, which require attention if this new framework is to be developed. All are derived from consideration of the changing conditions, which the knowledge economy brings.

They are the principles of openness, uncertainty, complexity, relationships, reflection, reforming, and restoration.

For a KM process to be effective, it must also have a focus on learning. Without a focus on learning, knowledge management is really only information management or management of potential knowledge. In order to be true knowledge management, the learning segment of the process must take place. The Training and Development function is uniquely qualified to coordinate the KM process with the subject matter experts and the information systems people.

Current technology allows for almost any kind of tangible content to be wrought into a digital form and loosely distributed, albeit manually, far and wide at a reasonable expense.

But some of the most valuable knowledge in organizations does not lend itself to capture quite as easily. How much skill and creativity embodied in a modern workforce can be rendered into some digital form, catalogued, and shared via knowledge management?

The answer is that the crown jewels of many organizations reside as "wetware" -- between the ears of skilled workers and in the finely honed talents and movements of their bodies. No level of technology is likely to change that for some time.

Apprenticeships can be called knowledge management from such a perspective. Yet these long-term mentoring practices and sharing of knowledge seem to have vanished in most modern organizations, even though skills of a highly personal nature are in high demand.

Whether it's a geologist who has an instinct for where to drill for oil, or a programmer whose particularly gifted at smoothing out code, the need to capture and pass along such hard-to-quantify skills is as acute as ever.

Moreover, our culture of compensation in many ways creates distrust between the skilled worker and the organization: To safeguard against downsizing or layoffs, workers hoard, rather than share, their knowledge.

Many cultures are so steeped in the primacy of the individual that many organizations lack even a simple way beyond the telephone directory to identify who in a organization possesses the most any, let alone, the most precious skills in particular areas.

Strategic use of information that is distributed and managed on organization networks is shaping up as the dominant currency of intranets. The right information to and from the right people at the right time is enormously powerful.

However, the more content gets jammed out on a network, the more urgent it is to manage it, to automate its routing – and perhaps even blend it with applications that allow people to work more productively.

The information that is tangible often comes from two sources: structured, such as from a database, and unstructured, such as e-mail, faxes, voice mail, PowerPoint presentations, and many file-based documents. Often, the structured information was initially stored in a proprietary format, so access to that data is limited to few people.

Knowledge management entails gathering information (this can be done using products from scanners to Web crawlers), organizing information (the emerging Web standard extensible markup language—XML, is being touted as playing a huge role here by creating tags to better organize and access data), distributing and disseminating information (through wide access to organizational, and public networks as well as data mining, search engines), collaborating on the results (there are many types of groupware available), and refining of information.

The current tools of the trade -- search engines and manual methods of categorizing content – can both enhance or erode productivity. organizations that manage their knowledge well could have a huge leg up on their competition. The knowledge management payoff usually comes only when both technology and culture shift to align in a common direction.

What Knowledge Management is

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