Knowledge management


Knowledge management refers to a range of processes focused on organizational awareness, learning, collaboration, and innovation. It involves using and sharing knowledge to support an organization's goals.
Courses in business administration, information systems, management, libraries, and information science are all part of knowledge management, a discipline that has been around since 1991. Information and media, computer science, public health, and public policy are some of the other disciplines that may contribute to KM research.
Numerous academic institutions provide master's degrees specifically focused on knowledge management.
As a component of their IT, human resource management, or business strategy departments, many large corporations, government agencies, and nonprofit organizations have resources devoted to internal knowledge management initiatives. These organizations receive KM guidance from a number of consulting firms.
Organizational goals including enhanced performance, competitive advantage, innovation, sharing of lessons learned, integration, and ongoing organizational improvement are usually the focus of knowledge management initiatives. These initiatives are similar to organizational learning, but they can be differentiated by their increased emphasis on knowledge management as a strategic asset and information sharing. Organizational learning is facilitated by knowledge management.
The setting of supply chain may be the most challenging situation for knowledge management since it involves several businesses without a hierarchy or ownership tie; some authors refer to this type of knowledge as transorganizational or interorganizational knowledge. industry 4.0 and digital transformation also add to that complexity, as new issues arise from the volume and speed of information flows and knowledge generation.

History

Knowledge management efforts have a long history, including on-the-job discussions, formal apprenticeships, discussion forums, corporate libraries, professional training, and mentoring programs. With increased use of computers in the second half of the 20th century, specific adaptations of technologies such as knowledge bases, expert systems, information repositories, group decision support systems, intranets, and computer-supported cooperative work have been introduced to further enhance such efforts.
In 1999, the term personal knowledge management was introduced; it refers to the management of knowledge at the individual level.
In the enterprise, early collections of case studies recognised the importance of knowledge management dimensions of strategy, process and measurement. Key lessons learned include people and the cultural norms which influence their behaviors are the most critical resources for successful knowledge creation, dissemination and application; cognitive, social and organisational learning processes are essential to the success of a knowledge management strategy; and measurement, benchmarking and incentives are essential to accelerate the learning process and to drive cultural change. In short, knowledge management programs can yield impressive benefits to individuals and organisations if they are purposeful, concrete and action-orientated.
The ISO 9001:2015 quality management standard released in September 2015 introduced a specification for 'organizational knowledge' as a complementary aspect of quality management within an organisation.

Research

KM emerged as a scientific discipline in the early 1990s. It was initially supported by individual practitioners, when Skandia hired Leif Edvinsson of Sweden as the world's first chief knowledge officer. Hubert Saint-Onge, started investigating KM long before that. The objective of CKOs is to manage and maximise the intangible assets of their organizations. Gradually, CKOs became interested in practical and theoretical aspects of KM, and the new research field was formed. The KM idea has been taken up by academics, such as Ikujiro Nonaka, Hirotaka Takeuchi, Thomas H. Davenport and Baruch Lev.
In 2001, Thomas A. Stewart, former editor at Fortune magazine and subsequently the editor of Harvard Business Review, published a cover story highlighting the importance of intellectual capital in organizations. The KM discipline has been gradually moving towards academic maturity. First, is a trend toward higher cooperation among academics; single-author publications are less common. Second, the role of practitioners has changed. Their contribution to academic research declined from 30% of overall contributions up to 2002, to only 10% by 2009. Third, the number of academic knowledge management journals has been steadily growing, currently reaching 27 outlets.
Multiple KM disciplines exist; approaches vary by author and school. As the discipline matured, academic debates increased regarding theory and practice, including:
  • Techno-centric with a focus on technology, ideally those that enhance knowledge sharing and creation.
  • Organisational with a focus on how an organisation can be designed to facilitate knowledge processes best.
  • Ecological with a focus on the interaction of people, identity, knowledge, and environmental factors as a complex adaptive system akin to a natural ecosystem.
Regardless of the school of thought, core components of KM roughly include people/culture, processes/structure and technology. The details depend on the perspective. KM perspectives include:
The practical relevance of academic research in KM has been questioned with action research suggested as having more relevance and the need to translate the findings presented in academic journals to a practice.

Dimensions

Different frameworks for distinguishing between different 'types of' knowledge exist. One proposed framework for categorising the dimensions of knowledge distinguishes tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge. Tacit knowledge represents internalised knowledge that an individual may not be consciously aware of, such as to accomplish particular tasks. At the opposite end of the spectrum, explicit knowledge represents knowledge that the individual holds consciously in mental focus, in a form that can easily be communicated to others.
Ikujiro Nonaka proposed a model which considers a spiraling interaction between explicit knowledge and tacit knowledge. In this model, knowledge follows a cycle in which implicit knowledge is 'extracted' to become explicit knowledge, and explicit knowledge is 're-internalised' into implicit knowledge.
Hayes and Walsham describe knowledge and knowledge management as two different perspectives. The content perspective suggests that knowledge is easily stored; because it may be codified, while the relational perspective recognises the contextual and relational aspects of knowledge which can make knowledge difficult to share outside the specific context in which it is developed.
Early research suggested that KM needs to convert internalised tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge to share it, and the same effort must permit individuals to internalise and make personally meaningful any codified knowledge retrieved from the KM effort.
Subsequent research suggested that a distinction between tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge represented an oversimplification and that the notion of explicit knowledge is self-contradictory. Specifically, for knowledge to be made explicit, it must be translated into information. More recently, together with Georg von Krogh and Sven Voelpel, Nonaka returned to his earlier work in an attempt to move the debate about knowledge conversion forward.
A second proposed framework for categorising knowledge dimensions distinguishes embedded knowledge of a system outside a human individual from embodied knowledge representing a learned capability of a human body's nervous and endocrine systems.
A third proposed framework distinguishes between the exploratory creation of "new knowledge" vs. the transfer or exploitation of "established knowledge" within a group, organisation, or community. Collaborative environments such as communities of practice or the use of social computing tools can be used for both knowledge creation and transfer.

Strategies

Knowledge may be accessed at three stages: before, during, or after KM-related activities. Organisations have tried knowledge capture incentives, including making content submission mandatory and incorporating rewards into performance measurement plans. Considerable controversy exists over whether such incentives work and no consensus has emerged.
One strategy to KM involves actively managing knowledge. In such an instance, individuals strive to explicitly encode their knowledge into a shared knowledge repository, such as a database, as well as retrieving knowledge they need that other individuals have provided. Another strategy involves individuals making knowledge requests of experts associated with a particular subject on an ad hoc basis. In such an instance, expert individual provide insights to requestor. When talking about strategic knowledge management, the form of the knowledge and activities to share it defines the concept between codification and personalization. The form of the knowledge means that it's either tacit or explicit. Data and information can be considered as explicit and know-how can be considered as tacit.
Hansen et al. defined the two strategies. Codification means a system-oriented method in KM strategy for managing explicit knowledge with organizational objectives. Codification strategy is document-centered strategy, where knowledge is mainly codified as "people-to-document" method. Codification relies on information infrastructure, where explicit knowledge is carefully codified and stored. Codification focuses on collecting and storing codified knowledge in electronic databases to make it accessible. Codification can therefore refer to both tacit and explicit knowledge. In contrast, personalisation encourages individuals to share their knowledge directly. Personification means human-oriented KM strategy where the target is to improve knowledge flows through networking and integrations related to tacit knowledge with knowledge sharing and creation. Information technology plays a less important role, as it only facilitates communication and knowledge sharing.
Generic knowledge strategies include knowledge acquisition strategy, knowledge exploitation strategy, knowledge exploration strategy, and knowledge sharing strategy. These strategies aim at helping organisations to increase their knowledge and competitive advantage.
Other knowledge management strategies and instruments for companies include:
  • Knowledge sharing
  • * Make knowledge-sharing a key role in employees' job description
  • * Inter-project knowledge transfer
  • * Intra-organisational knowledge sharing
  • * Inter-organisational knowledge sharing
  • * Knowledge retention also known as Knowledge Continuation: activities addressing the challenge of knowledge loss as a result of people leaving
  • * Mapping knowledge competencies, roles and identifying current or future predicted gaps.
  • * Defining for each chosen role the main knowledge that should be retained, and building rituals in which the knowledge is documented or transferred on, from the day they start their job.
  • * Transfer of knowledge and information prior to employee departure by means of sharing documents, shadowing, mentoring, and more,
  • Proximity & architecture
  • Storytelling
  • Cross-project learning
  • After-action reviews
  • Knowledge mapping requires the organization to know what kind of knowledge organization it has, how it is distributed throughout the company, and how to efficiently use and re-use that knowledge.
  • Communities of practice
  • Expert directories
  • Expert systems
  • Best practice transfer
  • Knowledge fairs
  • Competency-based management
  • Master–apprentice relationship, Mentor-mentee relationship, job shadowing
  • Collaborative software technologies
  • Knowledge repositories
  • Measuring and reporting intellectual capital
  • Knowledge brokers
  • Knowledge farming
  • Knowledge capturing