Knowledge Management

Knowledge in today’s world is the most valuable asset. Knowledge provides immense capability to individuals and also to organizations in taking right decisions and doing things right.  Knowledge comes from new lessons learnt, new experiences, new explorations and new activities which we carry out. Knowledge can be existing knowledge and also new knowledge. There is a greater need for ensuring existing knowledge is available to us for all our future work and any new knowledge that we create are collected and are made readily available to the whole organization in their current and new work.

While we create abundance of knowledge from our work, ironically very often knowledge is not collected and stored and is not made available to people and organization who can benefit from this. Much of knowledge somehow gets lost and never formally gets collected and stored.

In today’s modern organizations, there is a greater emphasis now on knowledge management. Wherein both culturally as well as strategically there is a focus on collecting all new knowledge and storing all these knowledge and making them readily available to the organization as when they are needed. Knowledge management thus makes global organization truly learning organizations and which in turn makes them much more responsive and efficient. 

Knowledge Management (KM) Process

Knowledge management is the process of creating, sharing, using and managing the knowledge and information of an organisation. It refers to a multidisciplinary approach to achieving organisational objectives by making the best use of knowledge.

Knowledge management will require data collection, data organization, data analysis, data summarization to create meaningful information and insights. The new information and insights will lead to new knowledge. The process of knowledge management uses automated tools and techniques to collect and process huge amount of data that is available in today’s organizations.

There are two major classification/category of knowledge as below:

• Explicit knowledge (knowledge which can be clearly documented and codified)
• Tacit knowledge (knowledge which is intuitive, personal and comes from experience)

Managing explicit knowledge can be easier while capturing and managing tacit knowledge will always be challenging.

Knowledge management broadly will focus on collecting data, converting data into information and information finally transformed into knowledge. 

The steps in knowledge management:

1. Collection of data
2. Organization of data in logical categories and with well-defined rules
3. Summarization of data and information 
4. Analysis of data leading information creation
5. Synthesising of information
6. Decision making with information created

Advantages of Knowledge Management:

1. Making available increased knowledge and content in the development of products and services 
2. Achieving shorter development cycles
3. Facilitating and managing innovation and organisational learning
4. Leveraging expertise and knowledge across the organisation 
5. Managing business environments and allowing employees to obtain relevant insights and ideas appropriate to their work in a timely manner
6. Solving difficult problems 
7. Managing intellectual capital and assets in the organization (such as the expertise and know-how possessed by key team members or stored in repositories)

Conclusion

KM is critical for global organizations. Managing knowledge requires capturing knowledge. While explicit knowledge can be captured well and managed well, capturing tacit knowledge from individuals is always challenging. KM will require an organization wide culture and belief about the significance of it and the value KM will bring to the organization. Knowledge management will use various automated tools and techniques for effective and efficient collection and management of information.