Chapter 5

5. Knowledge Management

5.1 Introduction

In an economy where the only certainty is uncertainty, the one sure source of lasting competitive
advantage is knowledge. When markets shift, technologies proliferate, competitors multiply, and
products become obsolete almost overnight, successful companies are those that consistently
create new knowledge, disseminate it widely throughout the organization, and quickly embody it
in new technologies and products. These activities define the "knowledge-creating" company,
whose sole business is continuous innovation.

The recent interest in organizational knowledge has prompted the issue of managing the
knowledge to the organizations benefit. Knowledge management refers to identifying and
leveraging the collective knowledge in an organization to help the organization compete.
Knowledge management is purported to increase innovativeness and responsiveness. Such
problem of maintaining, locating, and applying knowledge has led to systematic attempts to
manage knowledge.

What Is Knowledge?

Knowledge is the application of information to address specific situations in an organizational

context. Knowledge is information that is organized, synthesized, or summarized to enhance
comprehension, awareness, or understanding. That is, knowledge is a combination of metadata
and an awareness of the context in which the metadata can be applied successfully.

Knowledge comes in three forms: explicit, implicit and tacit.

Explicit is information in tangible forms, such as books, newspapers or scholarly

articles. Implicit is information that does not originate in a tangible form but can be transferred
into tangible form; for example, a dictation of a doctor's notes on a video recorder, or a verbatim
copy of an observation or account of an experience captured in a news article or
documentary. Tacit is information that is hard to capture in a tangible form; for example, a
person's perception of an experience or someone's feelings after an earthquake may be difficult
to express adequately in words.

1
Types of knowledge

Knowledge can be classified into several types and may differ according to the type of
organization and context. The classification of knowledge in a marketing, banking and financial
industry would be different from that of a professional service firm. The following are some of
the classifications of knowledge:

Explicit Knowledge

This type of knowledge is formalized and codified, and is sometimes referred to as know-what.
It is therefore fairly easy to identify, store, and retrieve. This is the type of knowledge most
easily handled by KMS, which are very effective at facilitating the storage, retrieval, and
modification of documents and texts.

From a managerial perspective, the greatest challenge with explicit knowledge is similar to
information. It involves ensuring that people have access to what they need; that important
knowledge is stored; and that the knowledge is reviewed, updated, or discarded.

Explicit knowledge is found in: databases, memos, notes, documents, etc.

Tacit Knowledge

It is sometimes referred to as know-how and refers to intuitive, hard to define knowledge that is
largely experience based. Because of this, tacit knowledge is often context dependent and
personal in nature.

Tacit knowledge is everything we know but cannot really express even to ourselves, or knowing
how to do something without thinking about it like riding a bike or playing soccer. This type of
knowledge is highly personalized, subjective, unspoken, intuitive, hidden and undocumented and
consists of technical skills, “know-how" or “understanding.” It also consists of cognitive
dimensions such as implicit mental models and beliefs that shape our perceptions of the world.
He describes explicit knowledge as a small body of knowledge considered as information that
enables other people to create their own knowledge. tacit knowledge as knowledge that is not
fully articulated in the minds of the individuals and as such difficult to explicitly document while
explicit knowledge is that which is written down, expressed in words and numbers and can be

2
easily communicated and shared in the form of hard data, scientific formulae, codified
procedures or a universal principle.

Tacit knowledge is found in: the minds of human stakeholders. It includes cultural beliefs,
values, attitudes, mental models, etc. as well as skills, capabilities and expertise.

5.2 What Is Knowledge Management?

As the amount of data and information increases within an organization, there needs to be some
formal policy to actively manage the resource so it can be accessed and used by managers. This
process of managing and providing access to data is commonly called knowledge management.
Effective knowledge management is a critical success factor in many organizations; it is
something that must be done correctly in order for that organization to survive, perhaps by
designing new products and providing good customer service.

Knowledge management is a series of steps that include identifying, collecting, storing, and
sharing explicit, implicit, and tacit information to individuals throughout an organization. An
example of a tool used in knowledge management is a corporation's intranet website.
Knowledge management is the process of creating, sharing, using and managing
the knowledge and information of an organization. as accessing, evaluating, managing,
organizing, filtering and distributing information in a manner that would be useful to end users

3
through a technological platform. the systematic, organizational and specific process of
acquiring, organizing and communicating both the tacit and explicit knowledge of employees so
that other employees may make use of it to be more productive. The process of knowledge
creation, codification, transfer and application, the creation, acquisition, capture, sharing and use
of knowledge.

5.3 Theories of Knowledge Management

In the early 1990s, knowledge management emerged as a formal scientific discipline supported
by scholars in academia, practitioners in corporate environments, and consultants. There are
several methods and applications of knowledge management, and each approach varies by the
scholar, author, or practitioner. The central knowledge management theories are categorized as
organizational, ecological, and techno-centric.

Organizational KM theory primarily focuses on organizational structures and how an

organization is designed culturally and hierarchically to manage knowledge and knowledge
processes.

Ecological KM theory focuses on people, relationships, and learning communities, including

interactions among individuals and organizations and the internal and external factors that draw
people together to share knowledge.

Techno-centric theory focuses on technology and the process of designing technology enablers
to help facilitate the flow of knowledge and the storage of information. Regardless of which
theory of practice is deployed, knowledge management includes the impacts of people, process,
and technology on knowledge sharing.

5.4 Knowledge Management Technologies

Knowledge Management Technologies are information technologies that can be used to

facilitate knowledge management. Knowledge Management Technologies are intrinsically no
different from information technologies, but they can focus on knowledge management rather
than information processing.

4
Knowledge Management Technologies also support knowledge management systems and benefit
from the knowledge management infrastructure, especially the information technology
infrastructure. KM technologies constitute a key component of KM systems.

Technologies that support KM include artificial intelligence (AI) technologies including those
used for knowledge acquisition and case-based reasoning systems, electronic discussion groups,
computer-based simulations, databases, decision support systems, enterprise resource planning
systems, expert systems, management information systems, expertise locator systems,
videoconferencing, and information repositories including best practices databases and lessons
learned systems. KM technologies also include the emergent Web 2.0 technologies, such as
wikis and blog (Becerra-Fernandez and Sabherwal, 2010).

Knowledge Management Strategies / Systems

Knowledge management strategies represent an organization's choices for investing in specific

methods to drive change. Are the integration of technologies and mechanisms that are developed
to support the four KM processes (discovery, capture, sharing, and application).The change
many organizations seek is increased revenue and profits and retention of highly talented
employees. There are many knowledge management strategies a company can select to facilitate
the efficient flow of knowledge and foster a culture of knowledge sharing. Some of these
strategies are:

 Knowledge Discovery Systems

 Knowledge Capture Systems
 Knowledge Sharing Systems
 Knowledge Application Systems.

Knowledge Discovery Systems support the process of developing new tacit or explicit
knowledge from data and information or from the synthesis of prior knowledge. These systems
support two KM sub processes associated with knowledge discovery:

 combination, enabling the discovery of new explicit knowledge; and

5
  Socialization, enabling the discovery of new tacit knowledge.

Knowledge Capture Systems support the process of retrieving either explicit or tacit knowledge
that resides within people, artifacts, or organizational entities. These systems can help capture
knowledge that resides within or outside organizational boundaries including within consultants,
competitors, customers, suppliers, and prior employers of the organization's new employees.

Knowledge sharing is an activity through which knowledge (namely, information, skills, or

expertise) is exchanged among people, friends, peers, families, communities (for example,
Wikipedia), or within or between organizations. Knowledge sharing is the process through which
explicit or tacit knowledge is communicated to other individuals.
Typical Examples of Knowledge Sharing:

 Writing books or research papers

 Delivering a lecture or making a speech or presentation
 Participating in a dialogue over coffee or lunch
 Participating in Communities of Practice
 Mentoring a new staff; shadowing an expert

Depending on whether explicit or tacit knowledge is being shared, exchange or socialization

processes are used. Exchange is used to communicate or transfer explicit knowledge among
individuals, groups and organizations.

Knowledge Application Systems support the process through which some individuals utilize
knowledge possessed by other individuals without actually acquiring, or learning that
knowledge.

Examples of Knowledge Application Systems

 expert systems
 decision support systems
 advisor systems
 fault diagnosis (or troubleshooting) systems

6
 help desk systems.