KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT

WHAT IS KNOWLEDGE ??
 Knowledge is the full utilization of information and data,
coupled with the potential of people's skills, competencies,
ideas, intuitions, commitments and motivations.
 knowledge is "information in action", i.e. information
applied for a purpose.
 In today's economy, knowledge is people, money,
leverage, learning, flexibility, power, and competitive
advantage. Knowledge is more relevant to sustained
business than capital, labour or land. Nevertheless, it
remains the most neglected asset.
WHAT IS KNOWLEDGE ??
 Knowledge is value-added behaviour and
activities.
 For knowledge to be of value it must be focused,
current, tested and shared.
 One way to look at knowledge is as follows -
Data Information Knowledge
–Data = 1 unit of fact;
–Information = aggregation of data;
–Knowledge = potential for action on information
TYPES OF KNOWLEDGE
 Explicit or formal assets like copyrights, patents,
templates, publications, reports, archives, etc.
 Tacit or informal assets that are rooted in human
experience and include personal belief,
perspective, and values.
Also called as unarticulated knowledge. It is more
personal, experiential. It is difficult to
communicate or share with others; and is
generally in the heads of individuals and teams.
WHAT IS KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT ??
 The term knowledge management was first
introduced in a 1986 keynote address to a
European management conference (American
Productivity and Quality Centre 1996).
 knowledge management simply means to
managing the ideas, knowing the subject matter
clearly and sharing the knowledge among sub-
ordinates.
WHAT IS KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT ??
 Knowledge management is an audit of
"intellectual assets" that highlights unique
sources, critical functions and potential
bottlenecks which hinder knowledge flows to the
point of use.
 It protects intellectual assets from decay, seeks
opportunities to enhance decisions, services and
products through adding intelligence, increasing
value and providing flexibility.
KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
 Knowledge is essential in everyday work.
Everyone knows how to carry out his work and
this knowledge can be reused later in similar
tasks by adopting this knowledge to new
situations. The general purpose of Knowledge
Management (KM) is to make knowledge usable
for more than one individual, e.g. for an
organisation as a whole; that is, to share it.
DEFINITION OF KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT

 "Knowledge Management is the discipline of

enabling individuals, teams and entire
organisations to collectively and systematically
create, share and apply knowledge, to better
achieve their objectives" - Ron Young
 KM is a “process through which organizations
generate value from intellectual and
knowledge based assets.”
KNOWLEDGE WORKER

 Knowledge workers in today's workforce are

individuals who are valued for their ability to
interpret information within a specific subject area.
They will often advance the overall understanding of
that subject through focused analysis, design and/or
development. They use research skills to define
problems and to identify alternatives. Fueled by their
expertise and insight, they work to solve those
problems, in an effort to influence company decisions,
priorities and strategies.
KNOWLEDGE WORKER
 Knowledge workers may be found across a variety
of information technology roles, but also among
professionals like teachers, lawyers, architects,
physicians, nurses, engineers and scientists.

 The term was first coined by Peter Drucker 1959, as

one who works primarily with information or one
who develops and uses knowledge in the workplace.
KNOWLEDGE WORK IN THE 21ST CENTURY
 Tapscott (2006) sees a strong, on-going linkage between
knowledge workers and innovation, but the pace and
manner of interaction have become more advanced. He
describes social media tools on the internet that now drive
more powerful forms of collaboration.

 Knowledge workers engage in ‘’peer-to-peer’’ knowledge

sharing across organizational and company boundaries,
forming networks of expertise. Some of these are open to
the public.
KNOWLEDGE WORK IN THE 21ST CENTURY
 Due to the rapid global expansion of
information-based transactions and interactions
being conducted via the Internet, there has been
an ever-increasing demand for a workforce that
is capable of performing these activities.
KNOWLEDGE WORK IN THE 21ST CENTURY
 While knowledge worker roles overlap heavily with
professions that require college degrees, the
comprehensive nature of knowledge work in today's
connected workplace is requiring virtually all workers
to obtain these skills at some level. To that end, the
public education and community college systems have
become increasingly focused on lifelong learning to
ensure students receive skills necessary to be productive
knowledge workers in the 21st century.
KNOWLEDGE WORKER ROLES
 Knowledge workers bring benefits to organizations in a
variety of important ways. These include:

 analyzing data to establish relationships

 assessing input in order to evaluate complex or conflicting
priorities
 identifying and understanding trends
 making connections
 understanding cause and effect
 thinking broadly
KNOWLEDGE WORKER ROLES
 creating more focus
 producing a new capability
 creating or modifying a strategy

 There is a set of tasks includes roles that are seemingly

routine, but that require deep technology, product, or
customer knowledge to fulfil the function. These include:
 providing technical or customer support
 handling unique customer issues
 addressing inquiries
KNOWLEDGE WORKER
 Drucker defines six factors for knowledge worker productivity (1999):

 Knowledge worker productivity demands that we ask the question: "What is the
task?"
 It demands that we impose the responsibility for their productivity on the
individual knowledge workers themselves. Knowledge workers have to manage
themselves.
 Continuing innovation has to be part of the work, the task and the responsibility of
knowledge workers.
 Knowledge work requires continuous learning on the part of the knowledge
worker, but equally continuous teaching on the part of the knowledge worker.
 Productivity of the knowledge worker is not — at least not primarily — a matter of
the quantity of output. Quality is important.
 Finally, knowledge worker productivity requires that the knowledge worker is both
seen and treated as an "asset" rather than a "cost." It requires that knowledge
workers want to work for the organization in preference to all other opportunities.
PROCESS OF KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
 Knowledge management is considered an
important part of the strategy to use expertise to
create a sustainable competitive advantage in
tomorrow’s business environment.

 Beckmans has proposed a eight stage process of

knowledge management as follows -
PROCESS OF KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
1. IDENTIFY
●

2. COLLECT
●

3. SELECT
●

4. STORE
●

5. SHARE
●

6. APPLY
●

7. CREATE
●

8. SELL
●
PROCESS OF KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
IDENTIFY –

This stage determines which competencies are critical to success.

For e.g. every organization needs knowledge about its customer
needs and expectations, products and services, finances, processes,
management, employees and environmental aspects etc. Then the
related strategies and knowledge domains are identified.

Here knowledge workers and expertise can demonstrate superior

performance. And then the gap between existing and needed
expertise are determined. The experts then together with training
and information technology professionals can begin to improve
expertise levels.
PROCESS OF KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT

COLLECT STAGE –

This stage deals with acquiring existing

knowledge, skills, theories and experience needed to
create the selected core competencies and knowledge.
So the experts should know where and how to get
the needed knowledge, expertise and expert system.
Also valid sources should be identified to acquire the
expertise.
PROCESS OF KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
SELECT –

This stage takes the continuous stream of collected

and formalized knowledge and assesses its value. The
experts must assess and select the knowledge to be
added to the organizational memory.
The filtering mechanism must be strong, otherwise
the corporate memory will be of no use. The valuable
knowledge will be lost in a sea of informational data.
PROCESS OF KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
STORE –

This stage takes the knowledge and classifies them and

adds them to the organizational memory.
The corporate memory resides in different forms in
human minds, on paper and electronically. Knowledge
must be organized and represented into different
knowledge structures just as the data and information are
organized and represented in different types of database.
Much of this knowledge can be represented in electronic
form as expert system.
PROCESS OF KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
SHARE –

This stage retrieves knowledge from the corporate memory

and makes it accessible to users. The workforce makes their
needs and personal interest known to the corporate
memory which then automatically distributes knowledge to
its ‘subscribers’ either electronically or on paper.
In addition, individuals, groups and departments often
share ideas, opinions, gossip, knowledge and expertise in
meetings, and valuable portions of these communications,
discussions, arguments, collaborations are made available
to the capture stage of knowledge management process.
PROCESS OF KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
APPLY –

This stage retrieves and uses the needed knowledge in

performing tasks, solving problems, making decisions,
researching ideas and learning.
Integrated performance support system(IPSS) are being used
by leading organizations to greatly increase the performance
and capabilities of knowledge workers.
For ease the access, the classification system to be built for
browsing or retrieving. To retrieve right knowledge the
system is required to understand the user’s purpose etc.
PROCESS OF KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
CREATE –

Create stage uncovers new knowledge through many ways. Such as

observing customers, customers feedback and analysis, casual analysis,
bench marking and best practices, lessons learnt from business,
research, experimentation, creative thinking, knowledge discovery etc.
This stage also covers how to bring out nonverbal and unconscious
knowledge from experts and turn it into documented formal
knowledge.
New sources of knowledge are captured by the knowledge
management process and made available to users who need the
knowledge.
PROCESS OF KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT

SELL –

This is the last stage in which new products and

services are crafted from the intellectual capital
that can be marketed external to the enterprise.
Before this stage is possible, considerable
maturity should be attained in the other seven
stages.
WHY KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT (KM)??

 Organizations compete increasingly on the base of knowledge

(the only sustainable competitive advantage, according to some)
 Most of the work is information based (and often immersed in a
computing environment)
 The products, services, and environment are more complex
than ever before
 By instituting a learning organization (KM-intensive), there is
an increase in employee satisfaction due to greater personal
development and empowerment.
 Keeps your employees longer and thereby, reduces the loss of
intellectual capital from people leaving the company.
WHY KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT (KM)??
 Provides workers with a more democratic place to work
by allowing everyone access to knowledge.
 Reduces costs by decreasing and achieving economies of
scale in obtaining information from external providers.
 Increases productivity by making knowledge available
more quickly and easily.
 Learning faster to stay competitive
 KM software and technological infrastructures allow for
global access to an organization’s knowledge, at a
keystroke
EXAMPLES OF SUCCESSFUL KM PROGRAMMES

 Ford Motor Company's Manufacturing Best

Practices Program - improves the efficiency of
manufacturing processes and the quality of
products.

 Rolls-Royce's Knowledge Acquisition and

Modelling Process - improves project
management processes.