Definition of Knowledge Management: A Working Perspective

‘Knowledge Management (KM) is the set of professional practices which improves the capabilities of the organization’s human resources and enhances their ability to share what they know.’

Knowledge Life Cycle

Knowledge in business can be seen to have a lifecycle of its own.

·         It must be created either within or outside the organization. This is typically comprised of iterative tacit and explicit loops until the knowledge is ready for distribution to those outside the creating group.

·         It can then be stored somewhere, either tacitly or explicitly so that it is accessible for others to find and use.

·         Those who need the specific knowledge must then find out where it is, when they need it, by searching in the right places and / or asking the right people.

·         Once the knowledge source is found, the user will then go through the act of actually acquiring it. This will involve gaining personal knowledge from other humans or documented sources.

·         Once acquired, the knowledge can be put to use towards some productive purpose.

·         Having been used, perhaps repeatedly, the user will learn what worked well and not so well as a result  of applying the knowledge gained. This can then be taken as significant input into further iterations of the knowledge creation and distribution process.

A key contributor to the effective management of this cycle is the concept of learning. Without the learning component, the cycle is devoid of knowledge. It merely, becomes an information delivery strategy, which becomes disconnected from the leverage of more effective human experience. The application of the delivered knowledge to operating the business (Find, Acquire and Use) will have some initial value but the delivered knowledge will be immediately out of date unless continuously renewed with the latest lessons learned from the application of the delivered knowledge (Learn, Create and Store).

Knowledge Management is the management of this cycle for optimal performance across all aspects of the Knowledge six pack.

Optimizing the Knowledge Management Process

The objective of knowledge management is to make this cycle more effective as well as more efficient. This implies that corporate knowledge be made available in forms which are readily accessible. This could take the form of Knowledge Documents, Processes, and Rules. These could be found embedded in Human Resources, Information Technologies, or in the design of Facilities. The embedded knowledge, in this way is accessible for reuse and ongoing evaluation for effectiveness and improvement. This challenge of performance improvement of the knowledge management lifecycle is critical to organizational success, for without it, overall business performance will suffer. Getting the best knowledge through the cycle quickly before it erodes is a major goal of many organizations in intellect-based fast-paced companies.

This challenge applies at the individual, workgroup, company-wide and inter-company levels. Each new level offers a greater degree of leverage and business results but also brings with it a set of more difficult issues, as long standing ways of doing things must be overcome.

Knowledge management is all about creating and maintaining the optimum environment to make this happen.

Knowledge Management closes the loop, which continuously converts tacit knowledge, based on experience into explicit knowledge for wider communication and back into tacit again through inference, experience and learning.