What is Knowledge Management? – Definitions and lifecycles

Knowledge is a set of information stored in human brain and used with the help of our senses. Gathering Knowledge is one of the basic processes which start when a child is born and continues till his death. It is a never ending process. Knowledge management is not a new concept. From early days when a human starts learning about the environment and nature, he shares that information with other persons. Their interaction with others helps to enrich their experiences. In the beginning, people engraved information on stones to save it. When Chinese discovered paper, then paper was used to secure it. After the invention of computer, process of knowledge transfer is shifted to the disks and CDs

Knowledge management is not a new term as Wilson (2002) argues in his article the Nonsense of 'Knowledge Management'. "It can be seen that the term did not occur until 1986..." I believe it was there but with different name and method. After the World War II, when organizations started becoming global. It was observed that many teams within the organization solved similar tasks without coordination or even without knowing what others are doing. Moreover, whenever a new employee joins in, he has to search for guidelines and policies from the beginning. This wastes time and money.

According to Prusak, (2001)

"Perhaps the majority of sceptics take the position--not an unnatural one--that every so-called new approach is, in reality, either old or wrong I would say to them that knowledge management, like any system of thought that has value, is both old and new, and its combination of new ideas with ideas that "everyone has known all along" should reassure practitioners rather than unnerve them."

An organization wants knowledge management because they want to bring innovation and customization in the product and preserve intellectual and practical sources of knowledge. This article will define and explain the notion of knowledge management and SECI model.

Definition

There are three basic concepts in knowledge management: firstly, 'creating knowledge' from within an organization or outside which is called 'knowledge exploration'; secondly 'dissemination of knowledge' through sharing or transferring, communication, dialog and streaming; and finally 'knowledge utilization' which is acquired, continuous generation of knowledge and auditing of knowledge (Moteleb at el, 2005).

Why Knowledge Management for Organization

In the mid 1980s, the market became more demanding and companies started stressing on product and service quality, responsiveness, diversity and customization (Wiig, 1997). Hence knowledge management for an organisation is very necessary. Wiig also explains,

"Competitive and successful experience shows that enterprise must create and sustain a balanced intellectual capital portfolio" (Wiig, 1997).

Second reason to start knowledge management initiative in an organization is that when employees leave the company, they take their knowledge with them and it takes time and money to fill the gap created by them. A survey by KPMG Peat Marwick (1998, in Alavi et al 2001) finds that almost half of the companies reported having suffered a significant setback from losing key staff with 43% experiencing impaired client or supplier relations and 13% facing a loss of income because of the departure of a single employee."

Telecom Company where I worked, once suffer same problem. In four months, three key personals from system department, resigned and there was no one to handle the system. Management had to hire an expert who was already working on these systems from vendor side at a very high price to run the business. After that incident, they implemented different polices like every standard operation procedure should be documented in centralized repository and every incident must be reported in the form of post-mortem report. These are some reasons which compel companies to buy expensive knowledge management solutions.

Types of knowledge in Knowledge management

Experts of knowledge management explain that there are two types of knowledge which need to be stored in organization.

Tacit Knowledge explains how a worker performs his/her daily task and with recursive action improves it during the course of time or it can be standard operation procedure to perform a certain task. The knowledge worker cannot explain this type of information in word to another person.
Explicit knowledge is information in the form of documentation, report, memo and report. It is like a technical data.
The basic goal of knowledge management system is to switch tacit knowledge into explicit in an organization. To achieve this experts develop the Knowledge Management life cycle.

Life cycle

Success of any knowledge management system is how effective tacit Knowledge can be converted in to explicit knowledge.

Nonaka (1991) explains Knowledge Life Cycle in simple four steps. This model is called SACI model

• Tacit Knowledge to Tacit Knowledge (Socialization)
  
• Tacit Knowledge to Explicit Knowledge (Articulation)
  
• Explicit Knowledge to Explicit Knowledge (Combination)
  
• Explicit Knowledge to Tacit Knowledge (Internalization)
  

Socialization

In socialization tacit knowledge is transferred into tacit knowledge. For example, Carpenters get an apprentice. He teaches him how to make a piece of furniture. Thus he transfers his tacit knowledge to his apprentice by demonstration and his apprentice watches and understands his action and improves his own tacit knowledge. In my pervious organization we use Socialization to train new colleagues

Articulation

To understand articulation, I will just add another scenario in the above example. Now that apprentice thinks he should transfer all his knowledge on a paper; he now converts his tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge. This is the process of Articulation. The basic idea is to convert tacit knowledge in to explicit knowledge. In this process IT has a primary role to codify(this word has no meaning) and store knowledge .In Telecom Company We used to store standard operating procedure in HP service manager 7, a tool widely used to monitor, store and manage applications, service calls and network alarms

Combination

Now another person converts the same paper mentioned in the above example, into a tutorial with some pictures and further explains the process. This is combination. This methodology is generally used in organizations. In my work place, we used HP service desk to log all service calls regarding issues and data error in Customer relationship Management System and Billing System and on every Monday we used to extract data of service call logged, resolved and open from Service desk and form a weekly activities report. Then we calculated the turnaround time of each service call to analyse our system performance. This report was then presented in the management meeting.

Internalization

In continuation of the same example, another person reads the tutorial and starts making furniture. Here he gets information from tutorial which is explicit knowledge and improves his skills which is tacit knowledge .This is the process of Internalization.

Conclusion

Knowledge management is not a new idea it is in-practice from millions of years. We can implement Knowledge Management system in organizations to improve the functionalities.

References

• Alavi, M., John and Lucy Cook, Dorothy E. Leidner (March 2001) Review: Knowledge Management and Knowledge Management System :Conceptual Fundation and Research Issues 1, MIS Quarterly Vol. 25 No. 1, pp. 107-136
  
• Moteleb, A., Woodman, M., Galal, G. & Bakry, W., (2005), 'Ontology of Knowledge Management Systems Elements', Proceedings of the European and Mediterranean Conference on Information Systems Information Institute Cairo Marriott Hotel & Omar Khayyam Casino, Cairo Egypt. June 7-8 2005
  
• Nonaka, Ikujiro, "The Knowledge-Creating Company," Harvard Business Review, Volume 69, November-December 1991, pp. 96-104.
  
• Prusak, L. (2001) where did knowledge management come from? IBM Systems Journal, 40(4), 1002-1007. Available at http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj/404/prusak.html [Site visited 1 February 2009]
  
• Wiig, Karl M. (1 September 1997) Knowledge Management: An Introduction and Perspective. The Journal of Knowledge Management Volume 1 Number 1
  
• Wilson T.D. (October 2002) The nonsense of knowledge management. Information Research, Vol. 8 No. 1,
  

What is the difference between Organizations, Social/Business Networks and Communities of Practice (CoPs)?

Man is a social animal. We need to interact with each other, whether its business or daily life. This helps us to develop relations and build up our trust in others. The basic concept behind all human networking platforms is to increase interaction between every kind of people so that we get to know them better.

Organization

People grouped together to pursue a common purpose or aim are part of an organization. It is an administrative or functional body with a hierarchical structure where everyone is designated with some responsibility. Each one has to work with in his jurisdiction.

Examples of organizations include:

UNO, NATO, OIC,

Social networks

A network is an interconnected chain, group or system. For example, a network of computers helps data to flow from one terminal to another. Similarly, in a social network, people connect with their friends, relatives and companions and form a network. This can help them to connect with their friends and also each other's friends. This way, they can increase their network of friends. As a social network help to develop a relation, like wise it also gives people opportunities to get jobs. Before the introduction of internet, people interacted with few people whom they knew, but after the development of social networking site, we get to know thousands of people with a single click. We can share information, pictures, events, emotions and experiences. This has given birth to a new concept of 6 degree of separation which is based on the experiment done by Jeffrey Travers and Stanley Milgram. (1969) the basic idea is that every person in the world is connected to the other with just 6 people between them.

As par business is concern, social networking sites earn money by advertising different products in the form of banners and this is a very profitable business which is rapidly growing.

Some common social networking sites:

Bebo, Orkut, Pownce, Facebook, Hi5, My Church, MySpace, You tube, linked In.

Business Network

Business network is same kind of network which helps to increase the business relation and circle of trust among business associates. We want to do business with person whom we trust and feel safe and business network is method to increase that trust and help use to develop contact and nerchering relationship which help our business to grow.

Communities of Practice

The word community is very common in our daily life .The dictionary meaning on community is "A group of people living in a particular local area" [1]

According to this definition people living in an area are community, student in one class, co-worker working in a factory or office are community. But if we talk about Communities of practice which is a new term, then immediately we get a picture that it could be people living and working together, sharing comment place and helping each other in different way become the Community of Practice. But actually the definition is quite different. According to Etienne Wenger" A community of practice is a group of people who share an Interest in a domain of human endeavour and engage in a Process of collective learning that creates bonds between them: a tribe, a garage band, a group of engineers working on similar problems." [2]

It is the collection of likeminded people grouped together to achieve a common goal but they could be from same or different knowledge backgrounds and each member has its own distinct identity within the group .A person could be the part to many communities of practice.

Implementation in our organization

VOSAPA inc. is a Mobile Phone Retail Company. All the partners are group together to from an organization to achieve our Business goal.

We introduce a social networking technique in our organization. A web portal Express to decrease social barriers within employees and management. We implement many traditions such as when an employ is hired he or she have to fill their profile with contain their basic information, education and experience. It is a sort of formal introduction of every employ with others members of organization. We encourage our employees to post articles and pictures about their families and their pervious experiences and any view about business Strategies and plans. We also implement internal web messaging service MExperss which help in communicating within a department and among retail stores, warehouses and different offices spread across country.

To implement business network technologies we have our business portal BIZExperss which connect all our mobile phone suppliers, office accessories suppliers, logistic services and recruitment ageneses. BIZExperss is a great opportunity for us to grow our business and help other companies to understand our business. This portal also help our partners companies to spread their business by discussing new aspect of their business and introducing new ventures and customers can get confidence on supplier through word of mouth and build strong relations with the help of our BIZExperss.

These are the small initiatives which VOSAPA inc. took in the context of community of practice within our organization and among our business partners. We are building relationships and bringing peoples together to form a nourishing community which will help peoples and business.

References

1. Reviewed from Google on 23 January 09 definition linked to http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=community )

2.Etienne Wenger (http://www.ewenger.com/theory/index.htm viewed on 23/01/09).

what do we mean by strategy?

Strategies

Strategy is a plan to achieve some target.It is like a road map to achieve goal.For an organization to grow, make profit and stay ahead in challenging business world, they need a good business strategy. Which could fulfil their business goal and with little modification they can introduce new idea in their organization and it must be long lasting.
For example if an organization plan to invest on their employees by training, health insurance, increasing wages or better working environment. Here organization is spending money on their employees but on the other hand they are making employees to stay in for longer time, that why companies run Career Development Programmers. Which help them to place employ in different role and judge his/her abilities to perform in particular role and they can place him/her where they work best.

Plan

bankie was right ,

Business plan is the formal write-up which tells how you will run your business to get financial help from sponsors and banks. We must to study the business plan of company if we want to invest in it.

Knowledge Management Stratagies lab 1

Hi,
my name is salis and this is my first ever blog post