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