Knowledge Management- (A Tool For Managing Intellectual Excellence.)

Knowledge refers to a person’s state of being with respect to some body of information. These states include ignorance, awareness, familiarity, understanding, facility and so on. Knowledge management comprises a range of strategies and practices used in an organization to identify, create, represent, distribute, and enable adoption of insights and experiences. Such insights and experiences comprise knowledge, either embodied in individuals or embedded in organizational processes or practice.

The Value of Knowledge Management
 
•    Emerging Perspectives.
•    Benefit of Knowledge Management.
•    Geography is history
•    Knowledge workers carry their product
•    Decision support system
•    Collaboration across the industry
•    Why to re-invent the wheel
•    Leader in change management
•    Flexible business approach
•    Knowledge intensive not capital intensive
•    Organizational Knowledge creation  process
 

Knowledge Management Process: Knowledge Management Process involves the continuous intraction among organization’s knowledge assets (organisation’s human resources and information processing systems) intellectual capital and leadership.

Business strategies related to knowledge management
Change management
Best practices
Risk management
Benchmarking

Conclusion: There are many aspects of knowledge management that need to be explored to better knowledge understand how knowledge can be applied. To begin with, Knowledge Management System must be explored to see how it will interact within existing organization structures.    Knowledge is ecognized as an important weapon for sustaining competitive advantage and many companies are beginning to manage organizational knowledge.
1.    Introduction: Knowledge refers to a person’s state of being with respect to some body of information. These states include ignorance, awareness, familiarity, understanding, facility, and so on.
Knowledge management: This term was coined by Kael Wiig who is a consultant in international   Labour organization sponsored in 1986.He defines KM as ,”a systematic, explicit and deliberate building, renewal and implicational of knowledge to maximize an enterprise knowledge related effectiveness and returns from it’s knowledge asset.”
KM is continuously creating and upgrading organizational knowledge in order to maximize the return from it’s knowledge assets.
KM helps the organization to-
•    Improve organizational effectiveness.
•    Improve the returns.
•    Build competencies/ competitive advantage/distinctive competencies.
•    Create greater value for core business.
•    See the opportunities and exploit them.
Tactic knowledge Vs. Explicit knowledge
Explicit knowledge is formal knowledge which is available in books ,reports, audio tapes, video tapes, CD’s etc. Tactic knowledge is the potential of an individual and which needs to be mined or exploited by means of face-to-face discussions, interviews etc. Tactic knowledge can be shared and exchange.
At knowledge Praxis, we define KM as a business activity with two primary  expects,
•    Treating the knowledge component of business activities as an explicit concern of business reflect in strategy, policy and practice at all levels of the organization.
•    Making a direct connection between an organizations intellectual assets both explicit (recorded) and tactic (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.
Few Definitions
1.    R. Greorge Wenig (1998) defines “KM from organizational perspective. According to his definition, Knowledge Management for the organization consists of activities focused on the organization gaining knowledge from its own experience and from the experience of others, and on the judicious application of that   knowledge to fulfill the mission of the organization.”
2.    Tom Davenport (1998, brint.com) says KM is: “Process of capturing, distributing, and effectively using knowledge.”
3.    Ellen Knapp (1998 brint.com) defines “KM as the art of transforming information and intellectual assets into enduring value for and organization’s clients and its people.”
2.    Knowledge Management Process: Knowledge Management Process involves the continuous interaction among organization’s knowledge assets (organisation’s human resources and information processing systems) intellectual capital and leadership.

3.    Four Dimensions of Intellectual Capital Human Capital: It is the skills, knowledge, abilities, values, commitment, attitude and aptitude of organization’s people. It comprises of explicit conceptual knowledge as well as tactic knowledge.
•    Structural Capital – It includes the explicit rules based knowledge embedded in the organization’s work processes and systems encoded in written policies, shared databases of best practices, patents and copywriters.
•    Social Capital – It is reflected in the ability of groups to collaborates and work together. Social capital makes workers into colleagues; t is the stock of active connections among people, the trust, mutual understanding and shared values and behaviors that make cooperative action possible.
•    Customer capital which captures all client relationships.
 
Beckman’s has proposed and eight stage knowledge management process.
These stages include:
Identify stage: This stage includes identification of competencies necessary for organizational success.
Collect stage: This stage includes acquiring existing knowledge, skills, experience etc. to possess the competencies.
Select stage: This stage deals with the assessment of value of collected knowledge against the standard requirements for success.
Store stage: This stage takes the nuggets of knowledge, classifies them and includes them in the organizational existing knowledge.
Share stage: This stage makes the new and existing organizational knowledge accessible for employees.
Apply stage: This stage enables employees to apply knowledge in organizational activities/ operations, decision-making, problem-solving, exploiting opportunities etc.
Customer acceptance: This stage involves obtaining customer’s acceptance/ client’s approval for the products/services produced/developed based on the knowledge.
Create stage: This stage involves development of new knowledge through observation, feedback, brain storming, failures in the previous events etc.            

4.    The Value of Knowledge Management: Some benefits of KM correlate directly to bottom-line savings, while others are more difficult to quantify. In today's information-driven economy, companies uncover the most opportunities — and ultimately derive the most value — from intellectual rather than physical assets. To get the most value from a company's intellectual assets, KM practitioners maintain that knowledge must be shared and serve as the foundation for collaboration. Yet better collaboration is not an end in itself; without an overarching business context, KM is meaningless at best and harmful at worst. Consequently, an effective KM program should help a company do one or more of the following:
•    Foster innovation by encouraging the free flow of ideas
•    Improve decision making
•    Improve customer service by streamlining response time
•    Boost revenues by getting products and services to market faster
•    Enhance employee retention rates by recognizing the value of employees' knowledge and rewarding them for it
Streamline operations and reduce costs by eliminating redundant or unnecessary processes.

5.    Benefit of Knowledge Management: What is the benefit of implementing Knowledge Management program in any organization? What is the advantage of KM? The answer to such questions requires through understanding of KM and its expected ROI ( Return on Investment). As eighty percent of organization knowledge is Tacit Knowledge so calculating the ROI is very difficult and it may not be possible also. The impact of a successful knowledge management program can be seen in terms of new and better product developments, higher customer satisfaction, reduce in input cost, higher productivity etc. There are many organizations who achieve all these without having a formal knowledge management program. These organizations have strong culture of innovation and sharing and must be spiraling through the knowledge creating process without even knowing the SECI model. These organizations have strong culture or sharing and innovating within their organization. A formal KM program accelerates this knowledge creating process in a structured way. For other type of organizations it facilitates the SECI model of knowledge creation. Let us know discuss the benefits of a formal KM program.

Geography is history: Our competitor is not far off from our place. With the global nature of today's business, companies are setting up their units and opening new marketing offices in any part of the world. The advantage of being local does not exit any more. Internet has give opportunity by providing a level playing field to all create and operate new business without having a office near the customer or consumer.

Knowledge workers carry their product: An organization can become learning or innovative one because of its intellectual assets and knowledge workers. These knowledge workers are key to the success and can bring tremendous improvement and change to the organization. But these knowledge workers do not need the traditional ways of providing motivation like financial rewards. Better financial package are must but not the one which will bring result. Decision support system. KM creates a platform for extensive data mining and triggers many trend analysis and business intelligence knowledge. It assists today's managers with better decision supports systems. With sharing of data and information across the organization and getting the details from customers and suppliers, managers can forecast the future trend and take better decision.

Collaboration across the industry: Knowledge creation process does not limit itself within the organization. Customer or supplier knowledge and its feedbacks create or trigger a new knowledge creating process. Conference and seminars brings new learning to the organization and introduces ones knowledge and expertise to others. It encourages partnership and collaboration to develop new products and services leveraging the experience of different organizations.

Why to re-invent the wheel: One company after a through research found the solution for a problem and when thy have gone to patent office to take the patent on their name, to their surprise they found that four years back the same solution has been patented by them. Many time precious resource and time gets wasted on finding a solution which is already done before. KM provides platform in the form of community of practices, discussion boards, ask expert system, yellow pages etc to provide or build the existing successful solutions. Such tools assist knowledge worker in developing and sharing such best practices and innovation across the community.

Leader in change management: Through innovation and sharing KM helps in developing new products and services or improves the existing practices. Some of these innovations or an improvement sets a new trend in the market and the organization takes the lead role among the peers. Knowledge driven organization always takes a leaders role and set a new standard for others to follow.

 Flexible business approach: Because of the strong networking culture Knowledge Management creates it helps in developing collaborative decision making and threat analyzing capability of any organization. The organization faces new challenges successfully and became a flexible organization to adopt new business environment. New product and services development in new areas became easy as Knowledge Management encourages collaboration among customers and suppliers by frequent interactions. Organizations inters into new line of business with their knowledge and collaborations with others.

Knowledge intensive not capital intensive:Today's business is not located near availability of raw materials or capital. They are flowing to the areas where knowledge is available. Companies future valuation heavily depends on its future market potential based on today's knowledge creating capability. Equipment or the capital is not the key differentiator among the organizations. Capital flows to the areas where knowledge is available to create more business product and services.

An Example: Tata Steel decided to embark on formal KM initiative in the year 1999. The beginning was made in July’99 to place a Knowledge Management (KM) programme for the company to systematically & formally share and transfer learning concepts, best practices and other implicit knowledge.
The emphasis on knowledge management was clearly demonstrated in 1999 while coining the vision statement of the company – which read “Tata Steel enters the new millennium with the confidence of learning and knowledge based organization…..” Then followed the new vision statement, co-created by the employees in 2001 (Fig. 1) which again identified ‘Manage Knowledge’ as one of the main pillars in strategy to become EVA+ by 2007. This clearly indicated the thrust Senior Management wanted on an initiative like KM.

The essence of Knowledge management is to capture the available abundant knowledge assets either in form of tacit (experience, learning from failure, thumb rules, etc.) or explicit (literature, reports, failure analysis etc.), to organize and transform the captured knowledge, and to facilitate its usage at right place and at the right time.

6.    Emerging Perspectives: Yes, knowledge management is the hottest subject of the day. The question is: what is this activity called knowledge management, and why is it so important to each and every one of us? The following writings, articles, and links offer some emerging perspectives in response to these questions. As you read on, you can determine whether it all makes any sense or not.

Knowledge Management (KM) comprises a range of practices used in an organization to identify, create, represent, distribute and enable adoption of insights and experiences. Such insights and experiences comprise knowledge, either embodied in individuals or embedded in organizational processes or practice. An established discipline since 1991 KM includes courses taught in the fields of business administration, information systems, management, and library and information sciences. More recently, other fields, to include those focused on information and media, computer science, public health, and public policy, also have started contributing to KM research. Many large companies and non-profit organizations have resources dedicated to internal KM efforts, often as a part of their 'Business Strategy', 'Information Technology', or 'Human Resource Management' departments. Several consulting companies also exist that provide strategy and advice regarding KM to these organizations.

KM efforts typically focus on organizational objectives such as improved performance, competitive advantage, innovation, the sharing of lessons learned, and continuous improvement of the organization. KM efforts overlap with Organizational Learning, and may be distinguished from that by a greater focus on the management of knowledge as a strategic asset and a focus on encouraging the sharing of knowledge. KM efforts can help individuals and groups to share valuable organizational insights, to reduce redundant work, to avoid reinventing the wheel per se, to reduce training time for new employees, to retain intellectual capital as employees turnover in an organization, and to adapt to changing environments and markets.

7.    Developing a context: Like water, this rising tide of data can be viewed as an abundant, vital and necessary resource. With enough preparation, we should be able to tap into that reservoir -- and ride the wave -- by utilizing new ways to channel raw data into meaningful information. That information, in turn, can then become the knowledge that leads to wisdom.

Before attempting to address the question of knowledge management, it's probably appropriate to develop some perspective regarding this stuff called knowledge, which there seems to be such a desire to manage, really is. Consider this observation made by Neil Fleming as a basis for thought relating to the following diagram.
•    A collection of data is not information.
•    A collection of information is not knowledge.
•    A collection of knowledge is not wisdom.

8.    Business strategies related to knowledge management: As you explore other explanations of knowledge management — Bo Newman’s Knowledge Management Forum is a good starting point — you’ll 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," a fact underscored by the recent announcement that John Wiley’s Business Change and Reengineering will become Knowledge and Process Management in March, 1997. There is a common thread among these and many other recent business strategies: A 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.

9.    Conclusion: KM as a field has been characterized by a great deal of confusion about its Conceptual foundations and scope. As a result, practitioners have tended to view KM interventions as those that have been given that name by themselves or others who claim to be practitioners. In this paper, we have suggested that Continuing that practice is destructive to KM as a discipline, because it prevents Coherent evaluations of Kim’s track record. Moreover we have (a) offered a Framework and set of criteria based on it for deciding whether claimed Interventions are bona fide instances of KM, and (b) illustrated the use of that Framework in critical evaluation of typical "KM" interventions, including extensive Discussion of an unambiguous case where KM has been done.This case, the well-known Partners HealthCare project, was also shown to illustrate a pattern of intervention that can serve as the basis of a long-term Systematic strategy for implementing KM in the enterprise. The strategy is risk based. It is one that can deliver concrete, incremental solutions and benefits to The enterprise by creating quality-control systems for knowledge-in-use as a Support for distributed decision making and knowledge processing. In the long Run, it can transform the enterprise into an organizational form that we call the Open Enterprise, and thereby support sustainable innovation and help solve the General problem of organizational adaptive ness and performance.

10.    References
1.    Dr. D. K. Bhattacharya, (2009) Human Resource Development, Himalaya Publishing House
2.    P Subba Rao, (2009)  Human Resource Development, Himalaya Publishing House
3.    Wayne Mondy (2009) - Human Resource Management , Pearson
4.    Cameron, K. and Quinn R (1998)
5.    Drucker,P.,1998
6.    Fagerberg, (2003),The Oxford Handbook of Innovation, Oxford University Press
7.    Lank, E.1997
8.    Gurbans S. Chatwal,
9.    Pamela,B. (2004), Shedding light on KM, HR Magzine,
10.    Ruggles , R., (1998) The state of the nation, knowledge management in practice, California Management Review
11.    Snowden , J., (2002), assessed 21 January