Knowledge is an ongoing process through the individual’s life. It is a powerful resource for organisational growth (Drucker, 1993; Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995).
Knowledge management (KM) is how an organization manages its collective expertise and subject matter knowledge. This activity contains several elements, specifically: acting, monitoring, evaluating, planning, and decision making, all of which allow an organization to use and transfer knowledge among its workforce (referred to as the Decision Execution Cycle.).
Chris Collison describes Knowledge Management as a set of tools, techniques, methods, and ways of working; behaviours that are all design to help the organisation being more organized and effective. It differentiates with other management systems, or movements because KM is more focus on the know HOW and the know WHO. How do you put that to work more effectively in the organisation. How do you share the key roles, the key points of the new systems. For that reason KM is a broad concept of techniques and approaches. People can find a tool which can help them to identify and support the networks in the organisation, KM it is a way of mapping; how people can be working while improving those connections. Who works with who, who you trust.
In this short video, Chris Collison (Knowledge Management Consultant) defines knowledge management, and explains the breadth of tools and techniques which underpin this discipline.
Moreover, a knowledge management system (KMS) is the planned workplace linkage of specific process steps or domains within an organization. A KMS allows an organization to systematically manage knowledge in order for its workforce to acquire, create and use knowledge to innovate and compete in the marketplace. Functionally, a KMS is a complex set of systematically coordinated human and organizational processes. Most organizations have ways to manage their knowledge, even if those ways are under-used or even unrecognized. But a truly effective management of knowledge requires the construction of an organizational system, a KMS.
The purpose of having KM strategies is to improve an organization’s competitiveness (Bellaver and Lusa 2002). Implementation of KM has to be delivered through a number of tools, for example, research collaboration, conferences, seminars, personal interaction, job rotation, the Internet, etc. The final strategy should reflect a company’s competitive strategy and is usually decided by the top management. The two kinds of KM strategy are codification and personalization (Koenig 2001a).
Furthermore, organizational learning describes the act of learning within an organization, including both the acquisition of knowledge and its dissemination within the organization.
KM emerged from the world of academia in the 1990s and has become a hot issue, especially for business and technology leaders (Frappaolo 2002). The motivation for actively engaging in KM is to improve employees’ decision-making and productivity (Koenig 2002). The concept of KM is nothing new, but the terminology is new.
Over the last 20 years there has been a wide range of proposed concepts or models in an effort to define KM. The components of KM that appear to make the most sense were offered by Spender and Scherer (2007), who defined KM as consisting of:
1. People
2. Processes
3. Technology
4. Culture
5. Structure
The five constituent components of KM suggested by Spender and Scherer represent the foundation of a Knowledge Management System (KMS). How do these components of KM fit into an organization's systems approach of managing knowledge on a day in and day out basis? Clearly, it is more than just the totality of systems in an information technology department. It requires an organization to consciously create a KMS.
Using KMS
Functionally, how do organizations develop their KMS? Many organizations have made an effort to practice KM using specific approaches, tools or techniques without actually using a systems approach. Some of these approaches/techniques and tools are: information technology (IT), content management, customer relationship management (CRM), data warehousing, social network analysis (SNA), storytelling, communities of practice (CoP), data mining, quality management (QM), business intelligence (BI), and online analytical processing (OAP), just to name a few of the more common organizational initiatives.' Some of these techniques are intended to enable organizational behavior, such as CoP or CRM. Others are enabling technologies, such as data warehousing or OAP. Many hospitals have used one or more of these techniques and tools to further their KM.
KM technologies expanded in the mid-1990s. Subsequent KM efforts leveraged semantic technologies for search and retrieval and the development of e-learning tools for communities of practice (Capozzi 2007).
The introduction of new information technologies has brought strategic initiatives for labour productivity to a new dimension as they have facilitated the capture, organization, transformation and communication of existing knowledge assets residing in the firm.
More recently, development of social computing tools (such as bookmarks, blogs, and wikis) have allowed more unstructured, self-governing or ecosystem approaches to the transfer, capture and creation of knowledge, including the development of new forms of communities, networks, or matrixed organizations. However such tools for the most part are still based on text and code, and thus represent explicit knowledge transfer. These tools face challenges in distilling meaningful re-usable knowledge and ensuring that their content is transmissible through diverse channels[18](Andrus 2005).
For instance, the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) has promoted capturing business value with social technologies.
According to Bughin et al (2012) it took 13 years for commercial television to reach 50 million households and 3 years for Internet service providers to sign their 50 millionth subscriber. Facebook hit the 50 million-user mark in just a year and Twitter in nine months. Sweeping cultural, economic, and social changes have accompanied this accelerated pace of adoption by the world's consumers.
Companies, too, have adopted these technologies but have generated only a small fraction of the potential value they can create. An in-depth analysis of four industry sectors that represent almost 20 percent of global industry sales suggests that social platforms can unlock $900 billion to $1.3 trillion in value.
Today only 5 percent of communications occur on social networks. Moreover, almost all digital human interactions can ultimately become "social," and jobs involving physical labour and the processing of transactions are giving way, across the globe, to work requiring complex interactions with other people, independent judgment, and the analysis of information (Beardsley, 2006) As a result, Mckinseys believe social technologies are destined to play a much larger role not only in individual interactions but also in how companies are organized and managed.
Productivity possibilities
Mckinseys estimate that using social technologies to improve collaboration and communication within and across companies could raise the productivity of interaction workers by 20 to 25 percent. These dramatic gains would occur thanks to shifts in the way these workers communicate -- from using channels designed for one-to-one communication, such as e-mail and phone calls, to social channels, which allow "many-to-many" communication.
Specifically, their research indicates that interaction workers typically spend 28 percent of each day (13 hours a week) reading, writing, and responding to e-mails. A huge amount of valuable company knowledge is locked up in them. As companies adopt social platforms, communication becomes a new form of content, and more enterprise information can become readily accessible and easily searchable rather than sequestered as inbox "dark matter." Employees will be able to find knowledge in the organization more readily and to identify experts on various topics, given the expertise implied by their patterns of social communication. They estimate that 25 to 30 percent of total e-mail time could be repurposed if the default channel for communication were shifted to social platforms.
E-mail is just the beginning. Companies could also raise the efficiency of the large part of the day -- roughly 20 percent -- that knowledge workers spend searching for and gathering information. In fact, our analysis suggests that a searchable store of social messages could allow employees to repurpose 30 to 35 percent of their information search time. For instance, Unisys, one of their enterprises, has started along the path to capturing value in this way: 16,000 employees around the world have joined a company-wide social network, and ten social communities provide ready access to specialized expertise from around the company to resolve technical problems. Capturing these technologies' full potential to improve collaboration and communication, however, will require organizational change and new management approaches, which often take time to implement.
Adding up the business benefits
Besides these productivity opportunities from improved collaboration, social technologies offer a wide range of business benefits in additional areas -- including consumer marketing (for instance, in industries such as consumer packaged goods and automotive), customer service, and even fraud detection (in sectors like insurance).
Other kind of industries that has adopted information technologies and Knowledge Management Systems are health care, construction, etc. An example of the last one is Bovis Lend Lease Inc. which is a global real estate investment and construction services company with approximately 10 000 employees, with regional headquarters in London, New York and Sydney. The company sought to introduce a knowledge management initiative to address a number of inefficiencies, such us continuous reinvention, as a result of lack of communication between teams; ineffective risk management and client dissatisfaction because of inconsistencies among personnel and project teams.
Bovis pursued a KM initiative, which included a KM team and an information technology platform to help facilitate the transfer of knowledge in and cross geographic regions. Its strategies facilitated in reducing frictions (lack of understanding because of the language barriers) that exist in the transfer of global knowledge resources that involve cultural factors. It enhanced effective communication, group cohesion. It also increased internal efficiency for an organization along with enhanced external customer satisfaction, which can lead to a competitive advantage (MacCormack, 2002).
Examples like Bovis, Mckensey, Hospitals, etc. and other companies around the world, who have adopted KMS, have to come across with different factors that make suffer and or can prevent the flow of the knowledge process. Factors like human element (lack of general follow-up, a lack of organisational trust), culture, etc. which can introduce serious limitations to successful communication of timely knowledge. Therefore, managers initiatives required to alleviate such ‘problems’ involve motivation, use of employee incentives (compensations and promotion directly connected to knowledge activities performance reviews), ‘top-down’ communication, etc. Management must not limit their efforts to the acquisition of ‘state-of-the-art’ storage, communication and information management technologies but must equally balance their efforts in creating a positive culture for knowledge transfer (Kudyba, 2005).
