Knowledge Management

The Rise and Rise of Knowledge Management:

“Leveraging Knowledge for sustainable advantage" was the title of one of the first conferences (in 1995) that brought Knowledge Management Agenda (1) from then the organisations have shown the interest in the topic of knowledge Management. In the present Scenario organisations have realized how important it is to " Know what they Know" and they try to make a maximum use of the knowledge, so most of the organisations have created some knowledge teams, these teams helps the organisation to know their knowledge assets and thus they advice the orgainsation as how to manage and make use of these assets to get maximum return and thus staying ahead in the competition.

what is Knowledge Management?

"...a discipline that promotes an integrated approach to identifying, managing and sharing all of an enterprise's information assets. These information assets may include databases, documents, policies and procedures, as well as previously unarticulated expertise and experience resident in individual workers." (Gartner Group Inc, October 1996)(2). Knowledge is Identified, Managed and then Shared and I can support the statement with an example, if we consider our own University, on our website we find FAQs ( Frequently asked questions) as per my knowledge the FAQs are not developed overnight, to develop these FAQs certain team must be appointed , then the team will go through the students queries and then they sort out and identify the most frequent questions that are asked by the students and then they answer the frequent questions and share them with the students.

But this view can change from person to person and there are numerous definitions of Knowledge Management which are defined by the Guru’s of KM and few of them are listed below.

"Knowledge management is a conscious strategy for moving the right knowledge to the right people at the right time to assist sharing and enabling the information to be translated into action to improve the organizational performance." (O'Dell & Grayson 1997)

The fundamental concept of Knowledge Management as explained by Ikujiro Nonaka is that between Explicit and Tactic. "Explicit knowledge is formal and systematic. For this reason it can be easily communicated and shared, in product specifications or a scientific formula or a computer program. Tacit knowledge is highly personal. It is hard to formalise and therefore difficult, if not impossible, to communicate."

Knowledge management is the explicit and systematic management of vital knowledge and its associated processes of creating, gathering, organizing, diffusion, use and exploitation. It requires turning personal knowledge into corporate knowledge than can be widely shared throughout an organization and appropriately applied (3).

KM is a process of knowledge creation, validation, presentation, distribution and application (Bhatt 2001)

Analysis of Knowledge Management:

After studying various articles of Knowledge Managemen I came to a conclusion and can firmly say that Knowledge Management is a useful tool or strategy for all the organizations so as to stay ahead in the competition. I can share my view about Knowledge Management with an experience that I had in my college when I was doing my under graduation. I was into my final year and being a final year student we were given a chance to organize an event, as it was an event where all the other colleges would come and compete with each for the main award i.e. The College of the year, as it was the competition for the best college, we all decided to give in our best for this event, so all our organizing committee had various discussions about this event, after few meetings we all decided to appoint some volunteers from each class and they would take the views of every student from their class and later when we all meet, the job of the volunteers was to explain us the views of students from their respective class and thus every student was given a chance to share their knowledge about how to organize the event and detail us about the strengths and weakness of our college.

After we received the views the organizing committee had a meeting where we discussed the most common problems and also our strengths and planned accordingly, by involving every student there was sharing and exchanging of knowledge and by doing so we got to know our strengths and weakness, and thus we as an organizing team gained knowledge from the views and were able to organize the event in a very successful way. According to me this is knowledge Management, the process where we gather information from different individual and managing that information in such a way that it can utilized by the organization to improve its performance.

Refrences:

(1) & (3). Skyrme, D. Knowledge management: making sense of an oxymoron. 1997 (Management Insight, 2nd series, no 2) referred on 17th feb, 2009 from Web page ref http://www.skyrme.com/insights/22km.htm
(2). Sheila Corral (1999) “Are we in the Knowledge Management Buisness?” reffered on 17th feb, 2009.
(4).Nonaka, I. The knowledge creating company. Harvard Business Review, (1991), 96-104
(5).Bhatt, G. (2001), “Knowledge management in organizations: examining the interaction between technologies, techniques, and people”, Journal of Knowledge Management, Vol. 5 No. 1, pp. 68-75.
(6). Knowledge Management specialist Library referred on 17th feb, 2009 from web page http://www.library.nhs.uk/KnowledgeManagement/

Data, Information and Knowledge

Data, Information and Knowledge are different terms but there is always a relation between these three terms and all three are interrelated, Tuomi (1999) argues that data emerges as a result of adding value to information, which in turn is knowledge that has been structured and verbalised. We can explain this with an illustration which suggests that the relation between data, information and knowledge is linear. The distance between data and information is the same as the distance between information and knowledge, implying that the effort required moving from one entity to another is the same.

From data to information to knowledge (6)

What is Data? Formal representation of raw materials (words, numbers or pictures) from which conclusions or interfences can be drawn (1), Davenport and Prusak, define data as a "set of discrete, objective facts about events”

According to Ackoff (1989) data is defined as a symbol that represents a property of an object, an event or of their environment. It is the product of observation but is of no use until it is in usable form. He also states that data is just raw it simply exists and has no significance beyond its existence.

According to Quigley and Debons (1999) data is defined as the text that does not answer questions to a particular problem.

But according to my analysis Data is generally representation of raw materials without any meaning and as a result, it is difficult to understand. It represents a fact or a statement of event without relation to other things
ex: 09885747970, London etc

What is Information? Information adds some context and meaning to data so that everyone can understand(1). Ackoff(1989) defines information as data that has been given meaning by way of relational connection. This "meaning" can be useful, but does not have to be.

According to Quigley and Debons (1999) Information is defined as the text that answers the questions who, when, what or where.

Knowledge according to my analysis can be explained as a message which is received and understood. If we have to define information then it can be said as “Collection of all raw materials which have some meaning".
Ex: My number in London is 09885747970

what is knowledge? According to Akoff knowledge is the appropriate collection of information, such that its intent is to be useful

When we study and understand the information we acquire knowledge, in simpler words knowledge can be explained as application of data and information.
Ex: when I was traveling in tubes for the first time, I got the information about my route through tube maps and when I looked at it and understood the route of my journey then I gained knowledge.

Data, Information and Knowledge are interrelated and I can explain it with an example of our module hand book, before the starting of term our module Leader will have all the information about the module and when they give it for printing the information provide by the module leader will become data for the people working in the press, and when it is printed and given to the students it is knowledge for us.

References:
(1). Gene Belinger, Durval Castro, Anthony Mills (2004) in “Data, Information, Knowledge and Wisdom” retrieved on 10th feb 09 from web pages http://www.systems-thinking.org/dikw/dikw.htm
(2). GCSE Bitesize retrieved on 10th feb 09 from web page http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/gcsebitesize/ict/databases/0datainforev1.shtml
(3).Thomas Davenport and Laurence Prusak (1998) in “Working Knowledge”
(4).Jennifer Rowley, Richard Hartley (2008) in “Organizing Knowledge: An Introduction to Managing Access to Information” retrieved on 17th feb, 2009.
(5).Quigley, E. J. and Debons, A. (1999), ‘Interrogative Theory of Information and Knowledge’, pg (4-10)
(6). Illustration retrieved on 18th feb, 2009 from web pages http://searchdatamanagement.techtarget.com/generic/0,295582,sid91_gci1283796,00.html

What is Strategy?

According to Michael E. Porter the need for strategy wouldn't have arised if there was only one Ideal position as there wouldn't be any competition,
but in the present scenario that is not the case as there is healthy competition in every field, hence everyone need some strategy to stay in the competition.

But according to Robert M. Grant, stratergy is explained as "The match an organisation makes between its internal resources, skills and the oppurtunities and risks created by its external envoirnment". from the above definition we can say that a strategy will have its own risks if it is not implemented in a proper way, hence there are few points that has to be considered before developing a strategy

• firstly the organisation resources should be identified and classified i.e. we should compare the weakness and the strengths of our organisation with our competitors, so that we can utilize our resources in proper way.
• secondly the capabilities of the organisation should also be identified
• finally a strategy should be selected which exploits the organisation resources and capabilities ( 2)

If we research further Roger Evered (1983) says that strategy is all about winning,he also adds that strategy is not a detailed plan or program of instructions, it is a unifying theme that gives coherence and direction to the actions and decisions of an individual or organisation. Further in his article he says that two sources of superior performance define two basic levels of strategy within an enterprise they are Corporate strategy and Business strategy. Corporate Strategy Defines the scope of the firm in terms of the industries and markets in which it competes, where as business strategy is concerned with how the firm competes within a particular industry or market(5)

Considering all the above discussed points strategy can be explained as a "process where the companies involve different set of activities to create some unique and valuable position".

According to me Companies use their Strategies to choose activities that are different from their competitors and the activities are planned in such a way that they exploit its own resources and capabilities before implementing into the market so as to avoid the risks, it can be explained with an example. I work for Lyca Mobile which is a leading SIM card dealer and they distributed their Sim cards for free for few days, the reason doing that is to ensure that they are ahead in the competition of SIM card business and before implementing this strategy into the market they exploited their resources and also their capabilities, then they implemented this strategy and it worked for them.

Ref:
(1). Porter, M.E. (1996), “What is strategy?” Harvard Business Review,
November/December retrieved on 5th feb, 2009.
(2). Grant, R.M. (1996), “Toward a knowledge-based theory of the firm” retrieved on 15th feb, 2009.
(3). Michael H. Zack (1999), “Knowledge and Strategy” pg (3-21)Retrieved on 6th feb, 2009.
(4).Grant, R.M. (2002), "Contemporary Stratergy Analysis: Concepts, Techniques, Application" pg (3-15) Retrieved on 18th feb, 2009.
(5).Roger Evered, “So What Is Strategy?”, The Concept of Strategy pg (1-15) retrieved on 19th feb, 2009.

Communities of Practice ( Cop)

what are communities of practice? certain group pf people who interact frequently to share and learn of something that they are passionate of, and also helping each other based on their common interest.

According to Etieme Wenger there are three most crucial characteritic that constitute C0P and they are

• The Domain
• The Community
• The practice

Communities of Practice can be explained simply with an example which I experienced. when I was assigned as the team leader for the previous company that I worked we had a official meeting where all the team leaders were asked to attend, In the meeting few programmers were explaining how to save the time sheets in the data base and I liked the concept as I thought it was user friendly and would help my team, so after the meeting I had a discussion with the programmer and we both came to a conclusion to work together on that concept that we both were passionate and we both had that common interest to work on it.

ref: Etieme Wenger Retrived on 2 feb 2009 from
http://www.ewenger.com/theory/

Organisation

what is an Organisation? organisation can be decribed as a body which is set up to meet certain set of goals, further more we can explain it as a place where group pf people work together combinely with a common mind-frame to achieve certain targets.
ex: Bijjam Information Technologies(BIT).

BIT is the place that I worked, and it had large number of staff and we all worked collectively to develop our company and everyone had the same frame of mind i.e. to work collectively, by working with same frame of mind all our company's aims and obejectives were accomplished gradually.