CH 5

Knowledge Management
Chapter 5
Outline
5.1. Introduction to knowledge management

5.2. The theory of knowledge management
5.3. KM sharing
5.4. Technologies to support KM
5.5. KM Application in Organization
5.1 Introduction to Knowledge Management
• Knowledge Management (KM) is the process of

gathering, managing and sharing employees' knowledge
capital throughout the organization.
• Knowledge sharing throughout the organization enhances
existing organizational business processes, introduces
more efficient and effective business processes and
removes redundant processes.
• It is a discipline that promotes a collaborative and
integrated approach to the creation, capture, organization
access and use of an enterprise's knowledge assets.
5.1 Introduction to KM…
• KM has now become a mainstream priority for companies of all
sizes.
• Specific knowledge management activities help focus on
organization on acquiring, storing and utilizing knowledge for
problem solving, dynamic leaning, strategic planning and decision
making.
• It also prevents intellectual assets from decay, adds to firm
intelligence and provides increased flexibility.
• Hence the need of Knowledge Management initiative arises to
become solution for such problems, which brings together people,
process and technology and helps corporate to achieve its goals
and vision.
• Knowledge management is an audit of "intellectual
assets" that highlights unique sources, critical functions
and potential bottlenecks, which hinder knowledge flows
to the point of use. It seeks opportunities to enhance
decisions, services and products through adding
intelligence, increasing value and providing flexibility.
• KM enhances other organizational initiatives such as total
quality management (TQM), business process re-
engineering (BPR) and organizational learning, providing
a new and urgent focus to sustain competitive position.
• Knowledge management systems also facilitate organizational
learning and knowledge creation.
• They are designed to provide rapid feedback to knowledge
Workers, encourage behavior changes by employees, and
significantly improve business performance.
• As the organizational learning process continues and its
knowledgebase expands, the knowledge-creating company works
to integrate its knowledge introits business processes, products,
and services.
• The integration knowledge helps the company become a more
innovative provider of high-quality products and customer
services, as well as a tough competitor in the market place.
Why we study KM?
• The most valuable asset of a 21st century institution,
whether business or non-business, will be its
knowledge workers and their productivity.
• Most of our work is information based.
• Organizations compete on the basis of knowledge.
• It helps firms learn from past mistakes and successes.
• It better exploits existing knowledge assets by re-
deploying them in areas where the firm stands to gain
something,
• It enhances the firm's ability to innovate
Role of KM for business
• Increase people skills and expertise through
sharing
• Facilitates collaboration in the innovation process
• Assist in converting tacit knowledge to explicit
knowledge
• help companies to turn human capital into
intellectual capital by creating values
• Provides necessary elements to solve critical
problems
Types of Knowledge
• Knowledge-creating companies exploit two kinds of knowledge.
– One is explicit knowledge, which is the data, documents, and
things written down or stored on computers.
– The other kind is tacit knowledge, of knowledge, which
present in workers. Long-time employees of a company often
know many things about how to manufacture a product,
deliver the service, deal with a particular vendor, or operate
an essential piece of equipment.
• Tacit knowledge is not recorded or codified anywhere because it
has evolved in the employee‘s mind through years of experience.
Furthermore, much of this tacit knowledge is never shared with
anyone who might be in a position to record it in a more formal
way because there is often little incentive to do so.
5.2 The theory of KM
• The model organizes knowledge flows into
four primary activity areas: knowledge
creation, retention, transfer and utilization .
1. Knowledge Creation. This comprises
activities associated with the entry of new
knowledge into the system, and includes
knowledge development, discovery and
capture.
5.2 The theory of KM…
• Knowledge Retention. This includes all activities that
preserve knowledge and allow it to remain in the system
once introduced. It also includes those activities that
maintain the viability of knowledge within the system.
• Knowledge Transfer. This refers to activities associated
with the flow of knowledge from one party to another. This
includes communication, translation, conversion, filtering
and rendering.
• Knowledge Utilization. This includes the activities and
events connected with the application of knowledge to
business processes.
5.3 Knowledge Management Sharing
• Knowledge management involves the display of
procedures and techniques used to get the most from
an organization‘s tacit and codified know-how
• While defined in many different ways, knowledge
management generally refers to how organizations
create, retain, and share knowledge
• knowledge sharing is seen as occurring through a
dynamic learning process where organizations
continually interact with customers and suppliers to
innovate or creatively imitate.
Why people do not want to share knowledge?
• Knowledge is power
– I don‘t have time
• You‘re just using other people‘s ideas and taking
the credit!
• I want to do things my way!
• I‘m already suffering from information overload!
• That‘s not my job!
5.4 Technologies to support KM
• The ability of technologies aimed at Knowledge
Management is that they will help organizations use
their knowledge more efficiently without changing
the tools they currently use to create and process it.
• The technological tools currently classified as KM
applications may be grouped under the headings
1.Collaboration,
2.content management and
3.business intelligence.
1. Collaborative Tools
• Groupware (i.e. Lotus Notes)
• Meeting support systems (i.e. teleconferencing, data
conferencing, videoconferencing, e-brainstorming)
• Knowledge directories (i.e. corporate Yellow Pages)
• Extranet (customer/supplier communication)
• Intranet (intra-organization communication)
2. content management
• Internet/www (i.e. information provider)
• Document management systems (i.e. e-filing)
• Agents and filters (i.e. information
management)
• Office automation systems (i.e. assistance
tools, digital image processing)
• Electronic publishing systems
3. business intelligence
• Data warehousing (i.e. data mining)
• Workflow (i.e. helpdesk)
• (Group) decision support systems (i.e. intelligent
support systems, executive information systems)
• Knowledge base systems (i.e. artificial
intelligence, expert systems)
• E-commerce (i.e. Internet, e-tailing, e-business)
KM Application in Organization
• The major business drivers behind today’s increased interest in
application of KM lie in four key areas:
1. Globalization of business – Organizations today are more
global— multisite, multilingual, and multicultural in nature.
2. Leaner organizations – We are doing more and we are
doing it faster, but we also need to work smarter as
knowledge workers, adopting an increased pace and
workload.
3. “Corporate amnesia” – We no longer expect to spend our
entire work life with the same organization. This creates
problems of knowledge continuity for the organization.
4. Technological advances – We are more connected. We are
expected to be “on” at all times, and the turnaround time
in responding is now measured in minutes, not weeks.
KM Application….
• Some of essential KM applications in organization
are:
– Intra-net Search engine: strong, semantic search
engine that can reach all of your inside enterprise
content
– Entity extraction: Identifying entities contained in
content— people, places, locations, organizations, as
well as customized organizational entities.
– Customer feedback analysis: The opinions expressed
online by your customers and users contain valuable
insight about your companies, brands, competitors,
products and services.

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Knowledge Management

5.1. Introduction to knowledge management

• Knowledge Management (KM) is the process of

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