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/