Principles of Knowledge Management

Theory, Practice, and Cases

Eliezer Geisler, Nilmini Wickramasinghe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Topic: Business
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317415152
• Subtopic: Information Management
• Index: Business

This text provides a comprehensive introduction to the new field of knowledge management. It approaches the subject from a management rather than a highly technical point of view, and provides students with a state-of-the-art survey of KM and its implementation in diverse organizations. The text covers the nature of knowledge (tacit and explicit), the origins and units of organizational knowledge, and the evolution of knowledge management in contemporary society. It explores the implementation and utilization of knowledge management systems, and how to measure their impact, outputs, and benefits. The book includes a variety of original case studies that illustrate specific situations in which the absence or existence of knowledge management systems has been crucial to the organization's actions. Charts and figures throughout help clarify more complex phenomena and classifications, and each chapter includes review questions and a comprehensive index.

PART I

FUNDAMENTALS OF KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT

1	What Is Knowledge Management?

KEY LEARNING OUTCOMES

You will know you have mastered the material in this chapter when you can define and explain the following:

1. Knowledge management’s importantance in today’s knowledge economy.

2. What knowledge management means.

3. The challenges and drivers for knowledge management.

4. The evolution of the study of knowledge management.

As we move into the twenty-first century, the need for rapid access to relevant knowledge has never been greater. The business world is increasingly competitive, and the demand for innovative products and services is enormous. In this century of creativity and ideas, the most valuable resources available to any organizations are human skills, expertise, and relationships. Knowledge management (KM) is about capitalizing on these precious assets in a systematic fashion. Most companies do not capitalize on the wealth of expertise in the form of knowledge scattered across their levels nor maximize the use of information and data, coupled with the potential of people’s skills, competencies, ideas, intuition, commitment, and motivation. In today’s economy, knowledge is people, money, leverage, learning, flexibility, power, and competitive advantage. Knowledge is more relevant to sustained business than capital, labor, or land. Nevertheless, it remains the most neglected asset and so KM has developed as the combination of business strategies, processes, tools, and techniques needed to address this void in organizations.

In this chapter we introduce the concept of KM. We highlight the need for it and define what it is and is not. As we shall find in further chapters, knowledge is not a simple construct to define; thus it should come as no surprise that the concept of KM is equally difficult to pin down. In this chapter we emphasize the need for a holistic approach to KM. We also discuss the evolution of KM: how it has come to be the discipline it is today. In doing so, we highlight the challenges of KM, the major drivers, and the KM strategies, process tools, and techniques that are difficult to embrace and yet so beneficial. This chapter serves as an overview of the KM area of research and practice. Subsequent chapters will then drill down into these various components in more detail.

WHAT IS KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT?

KM is quickly gaining recognition as a key determinant of value in the marketplace, organizational success, and competitive edge. Today, companies compete not only on the basis of product, service, and operational superiority, but also through the enhanced management of their corporate memory and intellectual assets. They are beginning to realize that their edge lies in how they manage the efficient flow and transfer of knowledge across the organization. A report, “Knowledge Management Software Market Forecast,” estimated that the total KM software market would reach $30 billion by 2015. A review of the business literature reveals many definitions of KM posited by various researchers and practitioners. A few of these definitions are described below:

According to the Gartner Group, knowledge management is a discipline that promotes an integrated approach to identifying, managing, and sharing all of an enterprise’s information needs. These information assets may include databases, documents, policies, and procedures as well as previously unarticulated expertise and experience resident in individual workers. (Lee 2000)

Knowledge management is an intelligent process by which raw data is gathered and transformed into information elements. These information elements are assembled and organized into context-relevant structures that represent knowledge. (Onge 2001)

KM is a formal process that engages an organization’s people, processes, and technology in a solution that captures knowledge and delivers it to the right people at the right time. (Duffy 2001)

Arthur Andersen defined KM as the discipline of enabling individuals in an organization to collectively acquire, share, and leverage knowledge to achieve business objectives. (Duffy 2001)

KM for the organization, then, consists of the ability to gain knowledge from its own experience and from the experience of others and to judiciously apply that knowledge in fulfilling the mission of the organization (Figure 1.1). These activities are executed by marrying technology, organizational structures, and cognitive-based strategies to raise the yield of existing knowledge and produce new knowledge. Critical in this endeavor is the enhancement of various cognitive systems (organizations, humans, computers, or joint human-computer systems) in acquiring, storing, and utilizing knowledge for learning, problem solving, and decision making (Skyrme 1991).

The common factor in all the definitions is the recognition of the enormous value that human resources contribute to the knowledge of an organization. Regarding knowledge creation, organizations have information about products, services, and processes stored in various systems such as databases, file servers, Web pages, e-mails, and enterprise resource planning (ERP). If all this information is stored centrally and is accessible to all the employees in the form of knowledge, it will not only reduce the time employees spend searching for data to make better business decisions throughout the enterprise, but also provide decision makers with more time for innovation and creativity. Organizations need to create enterprise information portals of knowledge that store a wide variety of structured and unstructured data sources in the form of knowledge so that knowledge will be accessible to all employees through easy Web-based interfaces. Information centers, market intelligence, and learning are converging to form KM functions (Drucker 1999; Hansen and Oetinger 2001).

• KM is a discipline that promotes an integrated approach to identifying, managing, and sharing all of the enterprise’s information needs. (Gartner Group)

• KM is an intelligent process by which raw data is gathered and transformed into information elements … these are assembled and organized into context-relevant structures that represent knowledge. (Onge 2001)

• KM is a formal process that engages an organization’s people, processes, and technology in a solution that captures knowledge and delivers it to the right people at the right time. (Duffy 2001)

• KM is the discipline of enabling individuals in an organization to collectively acquire, share, and leverage knowledge to achieve business objectives. (Arthur Andersen/Accenture)

• KM is the management of intellectual capital in the interests of the enterprise. (Hoffman 1998)

• KM is the concept under which information is turned into actionable knowledge and made available effortlessly in a usable form to the people who can apply it. (Information Week 2003)

Figure 1.1 What Is KM? Some Definitions

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DESCRIPTIONS OF KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT AND SOME IMPLICATIONS FOR ENTERPRISES

As described above by various authors, KM is a multidisciplinary approach that takes a comprehensive, systematic view of the information assets of an organization by identifying, capturing, collecting, organizing, indexing, storing, integrating, retrieving, and sharing them. Such assets include explicit knowledge, such as databases, documents, environmental knowledge, policies, procedures, and organizational culture, as well as the tacit knowledge of the organization’s employees, their expertise, and their practical work experience. Further, KM strives to make the collective knowledge, information, and experience of the organization available to individual employees for their use and to motivate them to contribute their knowledge to the collective assets (Figure 1.2).

KM has two primary facets: (1) planning, capturing, organizing, interconnecting, and providing access to organizational intellectual capital through such intellectual technologies as document markup, thesaurus construction, or need analysis; and (2) directing or supervising such assets and those who are involved in these processes. These facets may be integrated into a single role or divided among several roles in an organization (Drucker 1988; Ellerman 1999; Granstrand 2000).

Organizations collect data about customers, products, suppliers, and transactions through their transactional operational systems. This information is stored in many formats, both structured (databases, ERP systems, etc.) and unstructured (document and content management, groupware, e-mail, and other forms of interpersonal communication) (Clegg 1999; Davenport and Prusak 1998). KM transforms this information into knowledge. KM is an intelligent process by which raw data are gathered and transformed into information elements. In KM, data residing in an organization’s datasets, file servers, Web pages, e-mails, ERP, and customer relationship management (CRM) systems from all structured and unstructured data sources are integrated to a single enterpris...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Fundamentals of Knowledge Management
• II The Knowledge-Based Enterprise: Implementation of Knowledge and Knowledge Management Systems
• III Metrics and Impacts of Knowledge Management and Knowledge Management Systems
• IV Cases
• References
• Index
• About the Authors