Knowledge Management Reviewer: Importance of KM Chapter 1

Importance of Knowledge Management

• Organizations are becoming increasingly global, with multiple sites, languages, and cultures, making knowledge management crucial.
• Leaner organizations require efficient knowledge management to stay competitive.
• "Corporate Amnesia" occurs when knowledge is lost due to employee turnover, retirements, or departures.

Introduction to Knowledge Management

• Knowledge is the fact or condition of knowing something through experience or association.
• Information is a set of data that has been processed, analyzed, and structured to become useful.
• Systematic knowledge management involves capturing, structuring, managing, and disseminating knowledge to work faster, reuse best practices, and reduce costly rework.

Objectives of Knowledge Management

• Facilitate a smooth transition of knowledge and expertise.
• Minimize loss of corporate memory.
• Identify critical resources and areas where the corporation excels.

Business Perspective

• Knowledge management is a business activity that involves two primary aspects: the knowledge component of business activities and making a direct connection between an organization's intellectual assets.
• Explicit knowledge is recorded and can be easily disseminated, while tacit knowledge is personal and harder to articulate.

Knowledge Science Perspective

• Knowledge is the fundamental resource that enables personal, organizational, and societal intelligent behavior.
• It involves the creation, capture, organization, access, and use of an organization's intellectual assets.

Technology Perspective

• Information is turned into actionable knowledge and made available effortlessly in a usable form to the people who can apply it.
• A knowledge management system (KMS) is a virtual repository for relevant information.

Types of Knowledge

• Tacit knowledge is difficult to articulate and represents personal know-how.
• Explicit knowledge is captured in a tangible form and can be disseminated.

History of Knowledge Management

• The concept of knowledge management dates back to the 1960s, with Drucker coining the term "knowledge worker."
• Senge (1990) focused on the "learning organization" as a key aspect of knowledge management.

Generations of Knowledge Management

• The first generation focused on physical assets.
• The second generation focused on intellectual capital.
• The third generation focuses on taxonomy and content management.

Organizational Perspectives

• The first generation focused on information technology.
• The second generation focused on HR and corporate culture.
• The third generation focuses on taxonomy and content management.

Knowledge Management Cycle

• Get: seeking out information to make decisions, solve problems, or innovate.
• Use: combining information in new and interesting ways.
• Learn: learning from experiences and organizations.
• Contribute: sharing knowledge and experiences.
• Assess: evaluating the effectiveness of knowledge management.
• Build & Sustain: ensuring growth and maintenance.
• Divest: discarding assets that no longer create value.

Four Major Approaches to the Knowledge Management Cycle

• Zack & Meyer's approach focuses on knowledge creation and transfer.
• Bukowitz & Williams' approach focuses on generating, maintaining, and deploying knowledge.
• Mcelroy's approach focuses on knowledge production and integration.
• Wiig's approach focuses on products, services, and customers.

Social Nature of Knowledge

• Knowledge management involves viewing knowledge as something that is actively constructed in a social setting.
• Knowledge evolves through social negotiation and evaluation.
• Learning should begin in the relationships between individuals.

Communities of Practice

• A community of practice is a group of people who share knowledge and expertise.
• Example: Xerox's Eureka Project.

Information Literacy

• It is the ability to recognize when information is needed and have the ability to locate, evaluate, and use it effectively.

Productivity Paradox

• It refers to a surprising decline in productivity despite massive investment in computers.