Knowledge Management in Organization

Management Information Systems
Introduction
We define knowledge management as a business activity with two primary aspects:
Treating the knowledge component of business activities as an explicit concern of business reflected in strategy, policy, and practice at all levels of the organization.
Making a direct connection between an organization’s intellectual assets — both explicit [recorded] and tacit [personal know-how] — and positive business results.
In practice, knowledge management often encompasses identifying and mapping intellectual assets within the organization, generating new knowledge for competitive advantage within the organization, making vast amounts of corporate information accessible, sharing of best practices, and technology that enables all of the above — including groupware and intranets.
That covers a lot of ground. And it should, because applying knowledge to work is integral to most business activities.
Important sub-topics
We detect connections with several well-known management strategies, practices, and business issues, including
Change management
Best practices
Risk management
Benchmarking
A significant element of the business community also views knowledge management as a natural extension of "business process reengineering,"
There is a common thread among these and many other recent business strategies recognition that information and knowledge are corporate assets, and that businesses need strategies, policies, and tools to manage those assets.
The need to manage knowledge seems obvious, and discussions of intellectual capital have proliferated, but few businesses have acted on that understanding. Where companies have take action and a growing number are doing so implementations of "knowledge management" may range from technology-driven methods of accessing, controlling, and delivering information to massive efforts to change corporate culture.
Opinions about the paths, methods, and even the objectives of knowledge management abound. Some efforts focus on enhancing creativity — creating new knowledge value while other programs emphasize leveraging existing knowledge.

Why we need knowledge management now
Why do we need to manage knowledge? Ann Macintosh of the Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute (University of Edinburgh) has written a "Position Paper on Knowledge Asset Management" that identifies some of the specific business factors, including:
Marketplaces are increasingly competitive and the rate of innovation is rising.
Reductions in staffing create a need to replace informal knowledge with formal methods.
Competitive pressures reduce the size of the work force that holds valuable business knowledge.
The amount of time available to experience and acquire knowledge has diminished.
Early retirements and increasing mobility of the work force lead to loss of knowledge.
There is a need to manage increasing complexity as small operating companies are trans-national sourcing operations.
Changes in strategic direction may result in the loss of knowledge in a specific area.
To these paraphrases of Ms. Macintosh’s observations we would add:
Most of our work is information based.
Organizations compete on the basis of knowledge.
Products and services are increasingly complex, endowing them with a significant information component.
The need for life-long learning is an inescapable reality.
In brief, knowledge and information have become the medium in which business problems occur. As a result, managing knowledge represents the primary opportunity for achieving substantial savings, significant improvements in human performance, and competitive advantage.
It’s not just a Fortune 500 business problem. Small companies need formal approaches to knowledge management even more, because they don’t have the market leverage, inertia, and resources that big companies do. They have to be much more flexible, more responsive, and more "right" (make better decisions) — because even small mistakes can be fatal to them.
Categorization of knowledge management approaches
The term "knowledge management" is now in widespread use, having appeared in the titles of many new books about knowledge management as a business strategy, as well as in articles in many business publications, including The Wall Street Journal. There are, of course, many ways to slice up the multi-faceted world of knowledge management. However, it’s often useful to categorize them.
In a posting to the Knowledge Management Forum, Karl-Erik Sveiby identified two "tracks" of knowledge management:
Management of Information. To researchers in this track, according to Sveiby, "… knowledge = Objects that can be identified and handled in information systems."
Management of People. For researchers and practitioners in this field, knowledge consists of "… processes, a complex set of dynamic skills, know-how, etc., that is constantly changing."
Sveiby’s characterization is on target, but it may not capture the full flavor of the important distinctions in approaches to organizational knowledge management.
We have adopted a three-part categorization:
(1) Mechanistic approaches (2) Cultural/behavioristic approaches(3) Systematic approaches to knowledge management
Mechanistic approaches to knowledge management
Mechanistic approaches to knowledge management are characterized by the application of technology and resources to do more of the same better. The main assumptions of the mechanistic approach include:
Better accessibility to information is a key, including enhanced methods of access and reuse of documents (hypertext linking, databases, full-text search, etc.)
Networking technology in general (especially intranets), and groupware in particular, will be key solutions.
In general, technology and sheer volume of information will make it work.
Assessment: Such approaches are relatively easy to implement for corporate "political" reasons, because the technologies and techniques — although sometimes advanced in particular areas — are familiar and easily understood. There is a modicum of good sense here, because enhanced access to corporate intellectual assets is vital. But it’s simply not clear whether access itself will have a substantial impact on business performance, especially as mountains of new information are placed on line. Unless the knowledge management approach incorporates methods of leveraging cumulative experience, the net result may not be positive, and the impact of implementation may be no more measurable than in traditional paper models.

Cultural/behavioristic approaches to knowledge management
Cultural/behavioristic approaches, with substantial roots in process re-engineering and change management, tend to view the "knowledge problem" as a management issue. Technology though ultimately essential for managing explicit knowledge resources is not the solution. These approaches tend to focus more on innovation and creativity (the "learning organization") than on leveraging existing explicit resources or making working knowledge explicit.
Assumptions of cultural/behavioristic approaches often include:
Organizational behaviors and culture need to be changed … dramatically. In our information-intensive environments, organizations become dysfunctional relative to business objectives.
Organizational behaviors and culture can be changed, but traditional technology and methods of attempting to solve the "knowledge problem" have reached their limits of effectiveness. A "holistic" view is required. Theories of behavior of large-scale systems are often invoked.
It’s the processes that matter, not the technology.
Nothing happens or changes unless a manager makes it happen.
Assessment: The cultural factors affecting organizational change have almost certainly been undervalued, and cultural/behavioristic implementations have shown some benefits. But the cause-effect relationship between cultural strategy and business benefits is not clear, because the "Hawthorne Effect" may come into play, and because we still can’t make dependable predictions about systems as complex as knowledge-based business organizations. Positive results achieved by cultural/behavioristic strategies may not be sustainable, measurable, cumulative, or replicable and employees thoroughly "Dilbertized" by yet another management strategy may roll their eyes. Time will tell.
Systematic approaches to knowledge management
Systematic approaches to knowledge management retain the traditional faith in rational analysis of the knowledge problem: the problem can be solved, but new thinking of many kinds is required. Some basic assumptions:
It’s sustainable results that matter, not the processes or technology … or your definition of "knowledge."
A resource cannot be managed unless it is modeled, and many aspects of the organization’s knowledge can be modeled as an explicit resource.
Solutions can be found in a variety of disciplines and technologies, and traditional methods of analysis can be used to re-examine the nature of knowledge work and to solve the knowledge problem.
Cultural issues are important, but they too must be evaluated systematically. Employees may or may not have to be "changed," but policies and work practices must certainly be changed, and technology can be applied successfully to business knowledge problems themselves.
Knowledge management has an important management component, but it is not an activity or discipline that belongs exclusively to managers.
Assessment: Unrepentant rationalists in the business world are taking a systematic approach to solving the "knowledge problem." We will also find evidence of such approaches — as well as a less formal use of the term systematic knowledge management. Systematic approaches show the most promise for positive cumulative impact, measurability, and sustainability.