What Is Knowledge Management?In order for organizations to identify, create, represent, distribute and enable the receipt of what it knows, and how it knows it, they must integrate a form of knowledge management. This type of management is usually a part of the information technology and business strategy of any business. It's objectives are improved performance, general development of collaborative practices, lessons learned between projects, developmental processes, innovation, and the competitive advantage that every company wants to achieve. Knowledge management has been a big deal in companies since 1995 and has been established the basic discipline. There is no set definition of knowledge management but has been defined by three main perspectives which are techno centric, organizational, and ecological. In the techno centric, it is basically a focus on technology that enhances the knowledge of sharing and growth. In the organizational it is the process of finding out what is needed to facilitate knowledge processes and what organizations would be best doing these processes. In the ecological stand point, it is based on seeing the interactions between people, the identity and knowledge along with the environmental factors and how this all combines into a complex adaptive system. There has always been some sort of knowledge management around but it has never really been defined as such. Some examples of this would be discussion forums, corporate libraries, professional training, mentoring programs, peer discussions between on the job employees, and a formal apprenticeship. There are several key concepts in the perceptions of knowledge management and one main one is the difference between tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge. Tacit knowledge is the knowledge that is more internalized or subconscious and with this type of knowledge, the holder may or may not know that they have this knowledge. Within knowledge management, the main knowledge that is spoken of is the explicit knowledge where a person knows the information, but they hold this information explicitly to themselves and may or may not share this knowledge with others. The reason that knowledge management has come about with such a force is to try to have everyone share their knowledge that is in their head that they may not know about by sending employees through courses and training and also to harness that knowledge that someone is keeping to themselves and helping them to understand that we would all get further in the world if they would open up and share that knowledge with their peers. |