Knowledge management in organizations

Type :

Term papers

Pages :

7 pages

Format :

.doc

Published date :

05/23/2009

Category :

Business & market

Sub category :

Management

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Summary :

An introduction to knowledge management
The need for knowledge management
History
Strategies
1. Push strategy
2. Pull strategy
Approaches and methods
1. Techno-centric approach
2. Organizational approach
3. Ecological approach
Barriers
1. Cultural issues
2. Operational issues
3. Technological issues
Role of HR in overcoming obstacles
Conclusion
Bibliography

Abstract

knowledge management refers to the conscious, systematic, and organized activity of an enterprise in comprehensively gathering, organizing, analyzing, and sharing knowledge to further its goals. It comprises a range of practices that identifies, creates, represent, distribute, and enables adoption of insights and experiences embedded in the individuals working in an organization or in organizational processes or practice, and provides a framework for connecting people to people and people to information, with the objective to develop and share such distilled learning and best practices. Coded or documented knowledge like policy manuals, databases, white papers, patients and others are "explicit knowledge" easily accessible to people in the organization. knowledge management does not deal with such explicit knowledge, but rather deals with the knowledge embedded in the minds of people working in the organization, or "tacit knowledge", which constitutes between 70 and 80 percent of all knowledge in an organization. This tacit knowledge is intuitive, contextual, linked to experience, past memories, and is difficult to codify, document and communicate. Moreover, individuals, who are the repositories of such tacit knowledge, are not permanent fixtures in an enterprise, and when an employee leaves, he or she takes with them their tacit knowledge, which then become lost for the organization. knowledge management techniques and processes provide a structured approach to explicate a significant part of tacit knowledge from individuals, and convert them into explicit knowledge by documenting them in knowledge repositories and sharing them with others through the process of intensive dialogue and discussion. However, extraction of tacit knowledge and converting them to explicit knowledge is not enough. Sustainable competitive advantage of an organization comes not from what it collectively knows, but from how readily it acquires and uses new knowledge, and more importantly, how efficiently it uses what such knowledge. Thus it is only when the knowledge acquired through the knowledge management process is put to action that it becomes beneficial for the organization. organizations therefore need to identify areas where sharing of knowledge and best practices help increase company performance, and knowledge management provide an enabling framework to fully leverage the "collective knowledge" in an organization.