REPORT

ON
KNOWLEDGE
MANAGEMENT
Q.1.What is knowledge management (KM)?

There are several different, and sometimes quite confusing statements that claim to be a
definition of Knowledge Management' and there are different perspectives on what Knowledge
Management is. For example:

▪ KM is about systems and technologies

▪ KM is about people and learning organisations

▪ KM is about processes, methods and techniques

▪ KM is about managing knowledge assets

▪ KM is a holistic initiative across the entire organisation

▪ KM is not a discipline, as such, and should be an integral part of every knowledge workers
daily responsibilities

Unfortunately, there's no universal definition of knowledge management (KM), just as there's no

agreement as to what constitutes knowledge in the first place. For this reason, it's best to think of
KM in the broadest context. Succinctly put, KM is the process through which organizations
generate value from their intellectual and knowledge-based assets. Most often, generating value
from such assets involves codifying what employees, partners and customers know, and sharing
that information among employees, departments and even with other companies in an effort to
devise best practices. It's important to note that the definition says nothing about technology;
while KM is often facilitated by IT, technology by itself is not KM.

Some of the famous definitions of KM is:

"Knowledge Management is the discipline of enabling individuals, teams and entire

organisations to collectively and systematically create, share and apply knowledge, to better
achieve their objectives"

Ron Young, CEO/CKO Knowledge Associates International

“Knowledge Management is getting the right information to the right people at the right time
utilizing: people, processes and technology(PPT) to help make better decisions for their
organization. “

by Terrell Hebert (Stuttgart Germany)

Q.2. Why has Knowledge Management gained popularity now?

The level of interest has been building for several years. Many innovative companies have long
appreciated the value for knowledge to enhance their products and customer service. Our
analysis indicates several reasons why the level of interest has grown dramatically during recent
years:

 Globalization and competition - many organizations rely on knowledge to create their

strategic advantage. With available knowledge widely dispersed and fragmented,
organizations often waste valuable time and resources in 'reinventing the wheel' or failing
to access the highest quality knowledge and expertise that is available.

 Knowledge can command a premium price in the market - Applied know-how can
enhance the value (and hence the price) of products and services. Examples are the 'smart
drill' that learns how to extract more oil from an oil field, and the hotel chain that knows
your personal preferences and so can give you a more personalized service.

 Restructuring and downsizing - Without effective mechanisms in place to capture

knowledge of experienced employees, organizations make costly mistakes or have to pay
again for knowledge they once had on tap.

 Sharing of best practices - Companies save millions a year by taking the knowledge
from their best performers and applying it in similar situations elsewhere.

 Successful Innovation - Companies applying knowledge management methods have

found that through knowledge networking they can create new products and services
faster and better.

Q.3.What constitutes intellectual or knowledge-based assets?

Not all information is valuable. Therefore, it's up to individual companies to determine what
information qualifies as intellectual and knowledge-based assets. In general, however,
intellectual and knowledge-based assets fall into one of two categories: explicit or tacit. Included
among the former are assets such as patents, trademarks, business plans, marketing research and
customer lists. As a general rule of thumb, explicit knowledge consists of anything that can be
documented, archived and codified, often with the help of IT.

Much harder to grasp is the concept of tacit knowledge, or the know-how contained in people's
heads. The challenge inherent with tacit knowledge is figuring out how to recognize, generate,
share and manage it. While IT in the form of e-mail, groupware, instant messaging and related
technologies can help facilitate the dissemination of tacit knowledge, identifying tacit knowledge
in the first place is a major hurdle for most organizations.

Q.4.Besides using technology, how else can tacit knowledge be transferred?

Shadowing and joint-problem solving are two best practices for transferring or recreating tacit
knowledge inside an organization. With shadowing, less experienced staff observe more
experienced staff in their activities to learn how their more experienced counterparts approach
their work
Another sound approach is joint problem-solving by expert and novice. Since people are often
unaware of how they approach problems or do their work and therefore can’t automatically
generate step-by-step instructions for doing whatever they do, having them work together on a
project will bring the expert’s approach to light. The difference between shadowing and joint
problem solving is that shadowing is more passive. With joint problem-solving, the "expert" and
the "novice" work hand-in-hand on a task.

Q.5. How is sustainability of a Knowledge Management System possible?

There are three fundamental processes that sustain profound changes such as the introduction
of a KM system:
-developing networks of committed people
-improving business results
-enhancing personal results
To achieve sustainability, there must be a focus on learning, and learning how to harness the
learning capabilities that lead to innovation.

For significant change to lead to sustainability,

-hierarchical control must be put aside.
-The emergence and development of informal networks must be supported so that people can
share their tacit knowledge and help one another.
-Managers need to surrender control.
-And mental models need to be examined.

Q.6. What benefits can companies expect from KM?

Some benefits of KM correlate directly to bottom-line savings, while others are more difficult to
quantify. In today's information-driven economy, companies uncover the most opportunities —
and ultimately derive the most value — from intellectual rather than physical assets. To get the
most value from a company's intellectual assets, KM practitioners maintain that knowledge must
be shared and serve as the foundation for collaboration. Consequently, an effective KM program
should help a company do one or more of the following:
 Foster innovation by encouraging the free flow of ideas
 Improve customer service by streamlining response time
 Boost revenues by getting products and services to market faster
 Enhance employee retention rates by recognizing the value of employees'
knowledge and rewarding them for it
 Streamline operations and reduce costs by eliminating redundant or unnecessary
processes
 Reduces costs by decreasing and achieving economies of scale in obtaining
information from external providers.
  Provides workers with a more democratic place to work by allowing everyone
access to knowledge.
 Learning faster with KM
 Learning faster to stay competitive
 KM software and technological infrastructures allow for global access to an
organization’s knowledge, at a keystroke

These are the most prevalent examples. A creative approach to KM can result in improved
efficiency, higher productivity and increased revenues in practically any business function.

Q.7.What are the challenges of KM?

Getting Employees on Board

The major problems that occur in KM usually result because companies ignore the people and
cultural issues. In an environment where an individual's knowledge is valued and rewarded,
establishing a culture that recognizes tacit knowledge and encourages employees to share it is
critical. The need to sell the KM concept to employees shouldn't be underestimated; after all, in
many cases employees are being asked to surrender their knowledge and experience — the very
traits that make them valuable as individuals.

KM Requires Ongoing Maintenance

As with many physical assets, the value of knowledge can erode over time. Since knowledge can
get stale fast, the content in a KM program should be constantly updated, amended and deleted.
What’s more, the relevance of knowledge at any given time changes, as do the skills of
employees. Therefore, there is no endpoint to a KM program. Like product development,
marketing and R&D, KM is a constantly evolving business practices.

Dealing with a Data Deluge

Companies diligently need to be on the lookout for information overload. Quantity rarely equals
quality, and KM is no exception. Indeed, the point of a KM program is to identify and
disseminate knowledge gems from a sea of information.
Q.8. How can one gain support for KM effort and get people to use the systems and
processes which is put in place to facilitate KM?

One tried-and-true way to build support for KM is to pilot the project among employees who
have the most to gain and would be the most open to sharing their knowledge. This will vary
depending on the organization. It’s also a good idea to involve in the pilot a select group of
influencers—employees who are well-respected by their peers and whose opinions are highly
regarded in the organization. If both groups have good things to say about the KM effort, their
positive attitudes will go along way toward convincing others of the merits of KM.
To get people to participate in the KM effort, you have to bake knowledge collection and
dissemination into employees’ everyday jobs. In other words, you have to make it as easy for
them to participate as possible. A lot of early KM efforts failed because they added cumbersome
steps to the jobs of already overworked employees. So when things got busy, workers just didn't
bother with the extra steps. And since most people are already stretched so thin these days, they
can’t contemplate adding another layer onto their daily routine. The best KM efforts don’t seem
like an effort.

Linking KM directly to job performance, creating a safe climate for people to share ideas and
recognizing people who contribute to the KM effort (especially those people whose contributions
impact the bottom line) are also critical tactics for getting people to make KM a part of their day
to day.

Finally, many companies create incentive programs to motivate employees to share their
knowledge. This can work, but the danger with incentive programs is that employees will
participate solely to earn incentives, without regard to the quality or relevance of the information
they contribute. Ideally, participation in KM should be its own reward. If KM doesn't make life
easier for employees, it will fail.

Q.9. What are the various types of Knowledge Management Strategies?

Knowledge may be accessed at three stages: before, during, or after KM-related activities.
Different organizations have tried various knowledge capture incentives, including making
content submission mandatory and incorporating rewards into performance measurement plans.
Considerable controversy exists over whether incentives work or not in this field and no
consensus has emerged.

One strategy to KM involves actively managing knowledge (push strategy). In such an instance,
individuals strive to explicitly encode their knowledge into a shared knowledge repository, such
as a database, as well as retrieving knowledge they need that other individuals have provided to
the repository.[11] This is also commonly known as the Codification approach to KM.

Another strategy to KM involves individuals making knowledge requests of experts associated

with a particular subject on an ad hoc basis (pull strategy). In such an instance, expert
individual(s) can provide their insights to the particular person or people needing this (Snowden
2002). This is also commonly known as the Personalization approach to KM.

Other knowledge management strategies and instruments for companies include:

 rewards (as a means of motivating for knowledge sharing)

 storytelling (as a means of transferring tacit knowledge)
 cross-project learning
 after action reviews
 knowledge mapping (a map of knowledge repositories within a company accessible by
all)
 communities of practice
  expert directories (to enable knowledge seeker to reach to the experts)
 best practice transfer
 knowledge fairs
 competence management (systematic evaluation and planning of competences of
individual organization members)
 proximity & architecture (the physical situation of employees can be either conducive or
obstructive to knowledge sharing)
 master-apprentice relationship
 collaborative technologies (groupware, etc.)
 knowledge repositories ( an easy way to deploy secondary tier of data storage that can
comprise multiple, networked data storage technologies running on diverse operating
systems like databases, bookmarking engines, etc.)
 measuring and reporting intellectual capital (a way of making explicit knowledge for
companies)
 knowledge brokers (some organizational members take on responsibility for a specific
"field" and act as first reference on whom to talk about a specific subject)
 social software (wikis, social bookmarking, blogs, etc.)
 group decision support system (Group Decision Support Systems (GDSS) are a class of
electronic meeting systems, a collaboration technology designed to support meetings and
group work)
 e-learning applications
 discussion and chat technologies
 search and data mining tools

Q.10. What is social network analysis (SNA) and how is it related to KM?

Companies that have been frustrated by traditional KM efforts are increasingly looking for ways
to find out how knowledge flows through their organization, and SNA can show them just that.
SNA is a process of mapping a group’s contacts (whether personal or professional) to identify
who knows whom and who works with whom. In enterprises, it provides a clear picture of the
ways that far flung employees and divisions work together and can help identify key experts in
the organization who possess the knowledge needed to, say, solve a complicated programming
problem or launch a new product. M&M maker Mars used SNA to identify how knowledge
flows through its organizations, who holds influence, who gives the best advice and how
employees share information. The Canadian government’s central IT unit used SNA to establish
which skills it needed to retain and develop and to determine who, among the 40 percent of the
workforce that was due to retire within five years, had the most important knowledge and
experience to begin transferring to others.

SNA isn’t a replacement for traditional KM tools such as knowledge databases or portals, but it
can provide companies with a starting point for how best to proceed with KM initiatives. As a
component to a larger KM strategy, SNA can help companies identify key leaders and then set
up mechanism—such as communities of practice—so that those leaders can pass on their
knowledge to colleagues. To identify experts in their organizations, companies can use software
programs that track e-mail and other kinds of electronic communication to identify experts in
their organizations.

SOME EXAMPLES OF SUCCESSFUL KM

-BP - by introducing virtual teamworking using videconferencing have speeded up the solution
of critical operation problems
-Hoffman La Roche - through its Right First Time programme has reduced the cost and time to
achieve regulatory approvals for new drugs.
-Dow Chemical - by focusing on the active management of its patent portfolio have generated
over $125 million in revenues from licensing and other ways of exploiting their intangible assets.
-Texas Instruments - by sharing best practice between its semiconductor fabrication plants saved
the equivalent of investing in a new plant.
-Skandia Assurance - by developing new measures of intellectual capital and goaling their
managers on increasing its value have grown revenues much faster than their industry average.
-Hewlett-Packard - by sharing expertise already in the company, but not known to their
development teams, now bring new products to market much faster than before.