Knowledge management

KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT 2005

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Knowledge Management is tough to define . It has become such an oxymoron that many refuse to use the term . They would rather call it terms like organisational learning , knowledge sharing , intellectual asset management

Knowledge Management is not about managing people in the traditional sense , nor is it particularly about managing knowledge

If just to satisfy the need for providing a definition , Knowledge Management can be referred

to as the practice of harnessing and exploiting intellectual capital to gain competitive advantage and customer commitment through efficiency , innovation and faster and more effective decision-making

Knowledge management is a manipulation of data , information and knowledge . Information is organized data and knowledge is information in actionable context

Knowledge Management has to be looked at in terms of the organisation 's knowledge assets . Your knowledge assets need to be managed just as you would other assets (factories , machines , people , cash ) to ensure maximum return on investment . Knowledge assets include transaction data on all of your processes , projects , customers and vendors , research logs patents , trademarks , marketing strategies and business plans . It also includes competitive insights accumulated by every employee daily , and the competitive intelligence available through the Internet . Finally consider that knowledge also exists in the e-mails , Word documents spreadsheets and facsimiles that make up the organisation 's electronic infrastructure

And yet some are of the opinion that these account for only 10 of the organisation 's intellectual capital

The other 90 is in the heads of your knowledge workers . Your knowledge workers have a bank of experiences , skills , hard-won insight and intuition , and an investment in trust (as well as trust earned ) from relationships inside and outside of the organisation . To evaluate , share and leverage this type of information is not an easy task

The tools for knowledge management include collaboration , data warehousing , data mining , document management and Internet searches but the enabling factor for knowledge management is the corporate culture The corporate culture has to encourage everyone to share what they learn and reward such activities

At the end of the day , defining knowledge management is less important than how you practice it : you need to manage knowledge with a view to turning it into customer value

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REFERENCE

Steve Barth , Defining Knowledge Management , Knowledge Management (www .destinationKM .com ) June 19 , 2002

ARTICLE 2 : HYPERLINK "http /www .cio .com /archive /010199_know .html " http /www .cio .com /archive /010199_know .html

Knowledge is the most important asset in any company and is the key to survival in the Information Age . The challenge for companies is to manage knowledge which does not have a universal definition and cannot be quantified

Executives in organisation have a clear picture of what they want to happen , they just have to determine how to make it happen

A 1997 report from Ernst Young Center for Business Innovation in Cambridge , Mass , and Business Intelligence Ltd . in London...