Knowledge Management

Knowledge Management

Knowledge Management

Introduction

The concept of treating organizational knowledge as a valuable asset to leading organizations has been popularized by leading management and organization theorists. Organizations are being advised that in order to remain competitive, they must efficiently and effectively create, locate, capture, and share their organization's knowledge and expertise, and have the ability to use that knowledge on specific problems and opportunities. Firms are showing a tremendous interest in implementing knowledge management processes and technologies, and are even beginning to adopt knowledge management as part of their overall business strategy.

Although knowledge management is becoming widely accepted, few organizations today are fully capable of developing and leveraging critical organizational knowledge to improve their performance. Many organizations have become so complex that their knowledge is fragmented, difficult to locate and share, and therefore redundant, inconsistent or not used at all. In today's environment of rapid change and technological discontinuity, even knowledge and expertise that can be shared is often quickly made obsolete. However, while many people call for effectively managing knowledge, almost no research has been done regarding how to do it.

Literature review

Implementing Knowledge

Effective performance and growth in knowledge-intensive organizations requires integrating and sharing highly distributed knowledge. Although tacit knowledge develops through observing action, it is more easily exchanged, distributed, or combined among communities of practice by being made explicit. However, explicating tacit knowledge so it can be efficiently and effectively shared and reused is one of the least understood aspects of knowledge management. Even so, deciding which explicit knowledge an organization should use can affect competitive performance.

Knowledge may be naturally tacit or it might appear that way because it hasn't been articulated yet, most likely because of social issues. Articulating particular types of knowledge may not be culturally legitimate, because challenging what the organization knows may not be socially or politically correct, or the organization may be unable to see beyond its customary habits and practices. Also, making private knowledge public and accessible may result in a redistribution of power that may be upsetting or rebelled upon in particular organizational cultures. Knowledge also may remain unarticulated because of intellectual constraints in cases where organizations have no formal language or model in order to articulate it.

Potentially explicable knowledge that has not been articulated displays a lost opportunity to efficiently share and disperse that knowledge. If competitors have articulated the integration of similar knowledge, then they may obtain a competitive advantage. However, knowledge that is naturally inarticulable that organizations attempt to make explicit may result in the knowledge being lost, and performance suffering. Articulable knowledge that has been made explicit represents an opportunity that has been taken advantage of.

Organizations often do not challenge the way knowledge is stored, treated or passed on. However, managers should not blindly accept the apparent tacitness of knowledge. Mrs. Fields Cookies, for example was able to develop a knowledge process (baking cookies) to a level high enough to be explicated and articulated in a recipe that produces cookies of consistently high ...