Knowledge Management Solutions

With the concept like globalization gaining its world-wide acceptance, these days’ firms are setting up new marketing branches in different parts of the world. The benefit of being local does not exit any more. In fact the boom of internet has provided a new opening to operate any business without having an office near the customer. However at the same time one can not deny from the fact that one has to improve constantly in order to survive in the existing market with a knowledge driven business management process. In other words, running an organization’s knowledge and exploiting it in the marketplace is the newest quest for having a competitive advantage.

The biggest challenge for any business these days is to provide the correct information that can lead to effective knowledge and can be further used to make better decisions. Certainly, the interest in knowledge management has grown during the last few years. Knowledge management solutions create a platform for extensive data mining. With sharing of information across the firm and getting the details or feedback from consumers and managers can further help in predicting the future trend and thus take a better decision.

Knowledge management is a concept in which an enterprise gathers, organizes, shares, and analyzes its knowledge in terms of resources, documents, and people skills. KM involves data mining and some method of operation to push information to users. Knowledge management can also be a business process that formalizes management and leverage of a firm's intellectual assets. KM is an enterprise discipline that promotes a collaborative and integrative approach to the creation, capture, organization, access and use of information assets, including the tacit, un-captured knowledge of people.

In some organizations such as educational institutions, research labs and marketing services companies, “knowledge” is “the” backbone. Indeed in all organizations, the appropriate utilization of knowledge towards collective intelligence and wisdom plays a critical part in improving its own operations. These organizations seek to enforce a discipline that can be used to systematically leverage expertise and information to improve organizational efficiency, responsiveness, competency, and innovation. Systematically means that the discipline does not rely on informal water cooler conversations, but on planned processes, technology, measurement techniques, and behaviors. Knowledge management seeks to exploit all the key resources that an organization has in place and that can be put to use in a more effective way.

What is Knowledge Management?
A knowledge-based company builds its competitive strategy on the processing of intangible, often invisible nuggets of information that cannot always be quantified or recorded. Such knowledge may include information about competitors or the understanding of a crucial market segment. It also encompasses the expertise of individual employees that, when mined, can increase a company's competitive advantage.

Are information and knowledge different?
Yes. Information is data: hard numbers about a company's profits, losses or budgets; the phone number of someone at a competing company who can be coerced out of some secrets. Take that information and season it with context and understanding, and you get knowledge. Put that knowledge where other people can get to it and you are now managing the knowledge.

Where does knowledge reside in my company?
That's what makes KM such a difficult concept to put into practice. Knowledge is ubiquitous. While information can live inside myriad databases, true knowledge is more likely to lie hidden and undervalued in the minds of individual employees. And it may dwell in the relationships your colleagues have with people at other companies.

Aren't people reluctant to give up their knowledge?
Yes, and that's one of the trickiest parts of knowledge management. Before you can manage knowledge, you have to get it out of people's brains and into a central repository. And that's not easy to do if people have proprietary feelings about what they know. After all, knowledge is power, and the impulse to hoard rather than share is strong. Real KM—getting, refining and sharing information across the business—requires enormous organizational change. Only companies willing to remake their cultures around the value of sharing knowledge and insight will see the benefits.

How do I know I'm doing it right?
Quantifying a return on KM is hard to do definitively. Though a slew of companies are coming to market with software to help you try, it's still hard to put exact numbers on information organization. If careful attention to your intellectual assets has allowed you to abort a costly project before it failed, for example, you can count what you saved by not pursuing the project as KM ROI. And if there were a way to measure what you're losing by not undertaking knowledge management, then that would count as ROI, too. Companies that fail to exploit their knowledge tend to stumble on ideas and decisions with a haphazard approach rather than through a carefully organized method that takes full advantage of all available information. But happenstance is no longer enough. It's not what you have that's important; it's whether you can find it, and then what you do with it.


SO, HOW DOES ICREON IMPLEMENT A
KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT SOLUTION?

To implement a KM solution, Icreon follows the under-mentioned stages:

1. Identifying places and stages in an organization’s business process where knowledge plays an important part.
2. Devising a system or architecture to tactfully “map” knowledge key-stages and manual processes to IT-enabled processes.
3. Merging the core-business process with key inputs from the “Knowledge Base”, wherever applicable.