KM is a practice that involves the capturing and sharing of an organization’s information assets in addition to the experiences of their employees that can be acted upon to achieve the strategic goals of the organization.
It involves the sharing of data, transactions, information that leads to enhanced innovation and eliminates redundancy.
KM cannot be achieved through a single product, but must be developed through creating an organizational culture that encourages sharing, adapting the proper practices and using technology as an enabler for knowledge sharing.
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In order to leverage their intellectual capital and ensure sustenance of their competitive advantage in the highly complex and competitive global markets of today, organizations must remodel and restructure themselves resulting in the formation of knowledge organizations.
The mission statement and strategic plan of the organization acts as the foundation on which everything else is built upon.
The company culture and executive support from the pillars that hold the organizational fabric in place and provide the framework for the tools (such as e-Commerce) that facilitate communication of the explicit documents (the content) of the company.
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The employee knowledge and their experiences rest on top of the building and utilize technology to enable greater knowledge sharing.
Mankind has known the power of knowledge from time immemorial. In 1876, the English novelist, George Eliot, wrote, “Of a truth, Knowledge is power.”
It has been my observation that most often people get confused by the meaning and the scope of the term “Knowledge Management”.
The first thing that occurs to them is “How Knowledge Management is different from Quality initiatives like TQM and Re-engineering methodologies like BPR”, or “How is KM different from Artificial Intelligence or for that matter e-Business”.
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Knowledge Management forms the roof of the knowledge organization whose pillars comprises of the quantitative and qualitative techniques covered in the sections above.
KM uses and complements the quality initiatives and the technology infrastructure of an organization to provide sustainable competitive advantage.
This would provide a foundation for understanding how KM encompasses these methodologies to provide a framework that allows an organization to create, sustain, leverage, use and disseminate their knowledge resources effectively.
The organization would in the process, innovate and be the leaders in the free, competitive and complex global market place of the future.