An Introduction to Knowledge Management

Following technological advancement, machinery came into picture of production and it began to perk up the automation, and industry had no longer to rely on labours largely. However, as a result of huge investment in machinery, capital turned out to be more powerful. Managing flow of capital was a most important problem for the industrialists and swiftly capital became the bottleneck to competence. Though conventional three issues of production -land, labour and capital -have become easier to handle in 21st century, a fourth issue is more and more becoming a barrier for companies to grow. This is "knowledge", which is at the heart of much of today's global economy and managing knowledge has grown to be imperative for company's success. Knowledge has been recently recognized as one of the most significant resources of organizations. The capturing of an organization's knowledge facilitates an organization remain competitive and can help an organization continue to exist in the business world of today. 'Knowledge' can be defined as a fluid mix of experience, values, contextual information and expert insight that offers a framework for assessing and incorporating new experiences and information. In ancient Greece, the philosopher, Plato, in his dialogues, captured and elaborated the thoughts of his mentor Socrates, and as a result, succeeding generations have been able to discover and share that thoughts, and in turn reinterpret those thoughts and to be stimulated to accomplish fresh insights and creativity. The following bank account example illustrates how data, information, and knowledge relate to principal, interest rate, and interest. The numbers 100 or 5%; completely out of context, are just pieces of data. Interest, principal, and interest rate, out of context, are not much more than data as each has multiple meanings which are context dependent. If a bank savings account as the basis for context is established, the interest, principal, and interest rate become meaningful (information) in that situation with specific interpretations: Principal is the amount of money-Rs. 100, in the savings account, Interest rate-5%, is the factor used by the bank to compute interest on the principal. If Rs.100 is deposited in the savings account, and the bank pays 5% interest yearly, then at the end of one year the bank will compute the interest of Rs. 5 and add it to the principal. Subsequently, the account will have Rs. 105 in the bank. This pattern corresponds to knowledge, which permits the account holder to know how the pattern will evolve in time and the results it will generate. In understanding the pattern, what the customer is familiar with is knowledge -if the customer deposits more money in the account, he/she will receive more interest, while if the customer withdraws cash from the account, he/she will earn less interest. Thus, knowledge is information in action and it is what people in an organization know about their customers, products, processes, mistakes, and successes. Unlike the conventional material assets, which diminish as they are used, knowledge asset augments with use, and shared knowledge stays with the contributor while it enriches the receiver.

Knowledge management (KM) is the name given to the set of systematic and regimented actions that an organization can take to attain the maximum value from the knowledge available to it. Effective knowledge management normally requires a proper amalgamation of organizational, social, and managerial initiatives along with exploitation of apposite technology. The idea of KM is to gather, classify, store and spread all knowledge that is needed to make the organization both grow and flourish. The focus of KM is to leverage and reuse knowledge resources that previously subsist in the organization so that people will seek out best practices rather than reinvent the wheel. Knowledge management deals with two types of knowledge, tacit and explicit. In effect, these two types of knowledge are like two sides of the same coin, and are equally pertinent for the overall knowledge of an organization. Explicit knowledge (sometimes referred to as formal knowledge) is formal knowledge that can be packaged as information. For example, it is very simple to instruct someone how to calculate the area of a rectangle, a familiar example of explicit knowledge, by indicating that the area is a result of calculating the length of the rectangle by the width of the rectangle. Explicit knowledge can be found in an organization in the form of reports, articles, manuals, patents, pictures, images, video, sound, software etc., which have been created with the goal of communicating with another person. Explicit knowledge defines the identity, the competencies and the intellectual assets of an organization independently of its employees; thus, it is organizational knowledge par excellence, but it can grow and sustain itself only through an affluent background of tacit knowledge.

Tacit

…(Full text truncated)…

This content is AI-processed based on ArXiv data.