Assignment for

KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT

Lecturers MA.

Full Name Bui Mai Duy Phuong

Class 14BOBA02
Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to present an up-to-date view of the recent and applications of
Knowledge Management (KM). In it, I emphasize the critical role the emergence of Community
of Practice is playing in the global market growth of KM products, systems and business
applications and in the dissemination of KM. I review the fundamental concepts and the goals of
KM. Then, I explain why the emergence of Community of Practice, I will report subsequently on
the current trends in the KM market of products and solutions.
I. Introduction to knowledge management

Before we can talk about KM we need define what knowledge is.

Knowledge is "information resident in people’s minds, which is used for making decisions in
unknown contexts". While knowledge must be in the mind of a knowledge worker (or
automated process) to be productive, dormant or transient knowledge can be stored (i.e. in paper
or electronic format) for subsequent retrieval and application by the knowledge worker.

The point is, in order to have value, knowledge must be applied to a new situation on which a
decision or action can be made.

It is important to notice the distinction between knowledge and information. These two are
distinct entities. While 'information' stored in a computer system is not a very rich carrier of
human interpretation for potential action, ‘knowledge’ resides in the user’s subjective context of
action based on that information.

With a notion of what knowledge is, we can begin our discussion of Knowledge Management.

Experts have defined KM as the storing, sharing and utilization of knowledge information in an
organization for specific business advantages. There is no consensus on what KM is. Different
articles give different definitions of KM.

1. Principles of knowledge management

Definition: Knowledge Management Principles

Knowledge management principles are an enduring set of guidelines for managing knowledge
that are established by an organization, program or team.

Guiding principles for KM

 KM Strategy. People will focus and work more effectively through a shared vision and
values, and the knowledge management strategy must be aligned to this.
 Organizational learning. What have we learned today, as a learning organization, is
sometimes more important than what tasks we performed today. We have to be both a
learning organization and knowledge driven.
 KM process. No re-inventing of the wheel, No continual repeating of the same mistakes.
Every time we do something repetitive we should strive to do it better than the last time
 Knowledge travels via language. Without a language to describe our experience, we cant
communicate what we know. Expanding organizational knowledge means that we must
develop the languages we use to describe our work experience.
 KM Systems and Tools - Knowledge systems and tools are implements for knowledge
working. They should be to support knowledge asset driven strategies, processes,
methods and techniques. Be knowledge asset driven, not tools driven.
 The more you try to pin knowledge down, the more it slips away. Its tempting to try to tie
up knowledge as codified knowledge-documents, patents, libraries, databases, and so
forth. But too much strictness and formality regarding knowledge lead to the creativity
spoiled.
 Looser is probably better. Highly adaptable systems look chaotic. The survival rate of
diverse, decentralized systems is higher. That means we can waste resources and energy
trying to control knowledge too tightly.
 There is no one solution. Knowledge is always changing. For the moment, the best
approach to managing it is one that keeps things moving along while keeping options
open.
 Knowledge doesnt grow forever. Eventually, some knowledge is lost or dies, just as
things in nature. Unlearning and letting go of old ways of thinking, even retiring whole
blocks of knowledge, contribute to the vitality and evolution of knowledge.
 No one is in charge. If only we knew what we know, we would be three times more
effective tomorrow. Effective organizational knowledge management is the natural result
of effective personal and team knowledge management.
 You cant impose rules and systems. knowledge is truly self- organizing - a neural
network architecture that uses unsupervised learning. The most important way to advance
it is to remove the barriers to self-organization. In a supportive environment, knowledge
will take care of itself.
 KM – individual - Organizations learn only through individuals who learn first. What
gets rewarded gets done!
2. Objectives of implementing knowledge management

The purpose of the Knowledge Management process is to share perspectives, ideas, experience
and information; to ensure that these are available in the right place at the right time to enable
informed decisions; and to improve efficiency by reducing the need to rediscover knowledge.

The objectives of Knowledge Management are to:

• Improve the quality of management decision-making by ensuring that reliable and secure
knowledge, information and data is available through the service lifecycle
• Enable the service provider to be more efficient and improve quality of service, increase
satisfaction and reduce the cost of service by reducing the need to rediscover knowledge
• Ensure that staff have a clear and common understanding of the value that their services
provide to customers and the ways in which benefits are realized from the use of those
services
• Maintain a Service Knowledge Management System (SKMS) that provides controlled
access to knowledge, information and data that is appropriate for each audience
• Gather, analyze, store, share, use and maintain knowledge, information and data
throughout the service provider organization

II. The Fundamental of Knowledge Management

Knowledge Management, (KM) is a concept and a term that arose approximately two decades
ago, roughly in 1990. Quite simply one might say that it means organizing an organization's
information and knowledge holistically, but that sounds a bit wooly, and surprisingly enough,
even though it sounds overbroad, it is not the whole picture. Very early on in the KM movement,
Davenport (1994) offered the still widely quoted definition:

"Knowledge management is the process of capturing, distributing, and effectively using

knowledge."

This definition has the virtue of being simple, stark, and to the point. A few years later, the
Gartner Group created another second definition of KM, which is perhaps the most frequently
cited one (Duhon, 1998):
"Knowledge management is a discipline that promotes an integrated approach to identifying,
capturing, evaluating, retrieving, and sharing all of an enterprise's information assets. These
assets may include databases, documents, policies, procedures, and previously un-captured
expertise and experience in individual workers."

Both definitions share a very organizational, a very corporate orientation. KM, historically at
least, is primarily about managing the knowledge of and in organizations.

The operational origin of KM, as the term is understood today, arose within the consulting
community and from there the principles of KM were rather rapidly spread by the consulting
organizations to other disciplines. The consulting firms quickly realized the potential of the
Intranet flavor of the Internet for linking together their own geographically dispersed and
knowledge-based organizations. Once having gained expertise in how to take advantage of
intranets to connect across their organizations and to share and manage information and
knowledge, they then understood that the expertise they had gained was a product that could be
sold to other organizations. A new product of course needed a name, and the name chosen, or at
least arrived at, was Knowledge Management. The timing was propitious, as the enthusiasm for
intellectual capital in the 1980s, had primed the pump for the recognition of information and
knowledge as essential assets for any organization.

Perhaps the most central thrust in KM is to capture and make available, so it can be used by
others in the organization, the information and knowledge that is in people's heads as it were, and
that has never been explicitly set down.

Another way to view and define KM is to describe KM as the movement to replicate the
information environment known to be conducive to successful R&D—rich, deep, and open
communication and information access—and deploy it broadly across the firm. It is almost trite
now to observe that we are in the post-industrial information age and that an increasingly large
proportion of the working population consists of information workers. The role of the researcher,
considered the quintessential information worker, has been studied in depth with a focus on
identifying environmental aspects that lead to successful research (Koenig, 1990, 1992), and the
strongest relationship by far is with information and knowledge access and communication. It is
quite logical then to attempt to apply those same successful environmental aspects to knowledge
workers at large, and that is what in fact KM attempts to do.
III. The knowledge portal with right Technology.

Internal company networks have been around for decades. These networks, though, use their
own proprietary software, which is very costly to design, install, operate and evolve. This
software uses a set of protocols, unique for each company, installed in each computer
specifically for the use within this proprietary network.

Being very expensive, internal company networks did not provide global accessibility nor did
they interconnect all the computers and database resources of corporations. Being proprietary,
they did not provide the market opportunity for the development of cost effective, massively
used software capable of providing KM functionality.

With the booming of the Internet after 1994, the Transport Control Protocol/Internet Protocol
(TCP/IP) protocols became very widely used. These protocols essentially became the standard,
leading CIO’s to design their internal company networks based on these protocols. As a
consequence, any employee with a standard browser and the relevant passwords, can now access
the company’s network without the need for specially designed software.

An Intranet is officially defined as a self-contained intra-organizational network that is based on

the same technology as the Internet. Intranet Web pages, newsgroups, electronic mail and other
Internet-style services are provided mainly for usage within the organization.

Assuming that the reader of this briefing has experience using the Internet, an Intranet can be
thought of as a network with the same basic user interface and navigational capabilities as the
Internet, (e.g. Netscape browser) but with content that is only accessible and only relevant to
members of a specific organization.

Many companies use currently their Intranets to do the following type of activities:

Online Workflow Management: Through an Intranet it is possible to cut down some of the paper
trail in an organization by streamlining operations. A procurement system can be automated
through the Intranet with all the relevant parties "digitally certifying" a purchase order. When all
the relevant parties have approved the order, the Intranet can automatically forward the approved
order to the procurement officer.
Employee Training: Using multimedia tools, such as videoconferencing, employees can be
trained by personnel in remote locations. This significantly cuts travelling costs and gives access
to the better trainers to many more employees.

Publishing Company Information: By designing web pages specifically for the employees of a
company, information can be put online regarding product updates, pricing or even company
social events. This information, as opposed to a newsletter, can always be timely and relevant.

Communication via E-mail: Just like on the Internet, an Intranet can be used to facilitate person
to person, or person to group, private communication, through email. The company can have lists
of employee’s email addresses by department or geographic division and easily send one email
message to such a list, contacting hundreds of employees with minimal administrative and zero
paper costs.

IV. The implementation of a Community of Practice (CoP)

CoPs are groups of individuals with shared interests that come together in person or virtually to
tell stories, to share and discuss problems and opportunities, discuss best practices, and talk over
lessons learned (Wenger, 1998; Wenger & Snyder, 1999). Communities of practice emphasize
the social nature of learning within or across organizations. Conversations around the water
cooler are often taken for granted, but in geographically distributed organizations the water
cooler needs to become virtual. Similarly, organizations find that when workers give up a
company office to work online from home or on the road, the natural knowledge sharing that
occurs in social spaces must be replicated virtually. In the context of KM, CoPs are generally
understood to mean electronically linked communities. Electronic linkage is not essential, of
course, but since KM arose in the consulting community from the awareness of the potential of
Intranets to link geographically dispersed organizations, this orientation is understandable and
inevitable.

The classic example of the deployment of CoPs is that of the World Bank. When James
Wolfensohn became president in 1995, he focused on the World Bank's role in disseminating
knowledge about development. To that end he encouraged the development of CoPs. A CoP
might, for example, focus on road construction and maintenance in arid conditions, and the point
would be to include not only participants from the World Bank and the country where the
relevant project was being implemented, but also participants from elsewhere who had expertise
in building roads in arid conditions, such as staff from the Australian Road Research Board and
the Arizona Department of Transportation.

The organization and maintenance of CoPs is not a simple or easy undertaking. As Durham
(2004) points out, there are several key roles to be filled, which she describes as manager,
moderator, and thought leader. They need not necessarily be three separate people, but in some
cases they will need to be.

V. Conclusion

Knowledge is information resident in people’s minds, used for making decisions in unknown
contexts. Knowledge and Information are distinct entities. While 'information' stored in a
computer system is not a very rich carrier of human interpretation for potential action,
‘knowledge’ resides in the user’s subjective context of action based on that information. To have
business value, knowledge must be applied to situations on which a decision or action can be
made with resulting value added.

Organizationally, KM embodies processes that seek synergies in the combination of data and
information processing capacity of information technologies, with the creative and innovative
capacity of human beings. Technically, KM is a tool set for the automation of deductive or
inherent relationships between information objects, corporate users and business processes. The
corporate goals of KM are thus to capture internal and external knowledge, to improve the access
to that knowledge, to enhance the knowledge environment, and to manage knowledge as an
asset.

The demand for KM solutions has been witnessing tremendous growth in the past few years, the
adoption of Intranet solutions in Corporations has provided the basis to satisfy most of the basic
technical requirements for KM systems. The standardization of intercommunication, the
modularity provided by three layered client-server architectures, and the seamless internal access
provided by the Internet technology has created an enormous global market for KM systems
development. Today, most Intranets routinely support corporate-wide activities like publishing of
company information, communication via E-mail, groupware-based work, database access,
online workflow management, employee training, and many others.
Reference

Managing Knowledge for Competitive Advantage

www.knowledgex.com/kmwhite.htm

Kevin Jones, ‘Knowledge Management’s Net Gain’, Interactive Week, February 24, 1998.

Knowledge Management for the New World of Business:

www.brint.com/km/whatis.htm

Justin Hibbard, ‘Hot in ’98: Knowledge Management’, InformationWeek, January 5, 1998.

Justin Hibbard, ‘Enhanced knowledge Management’, InformationWeek

Alexander, Steve, Knowledge Bases Raise IQ, www.computerworld.com

Anthes, Gary, Defending Knowledge, www.computerworld.com