Advantages Of Knowledge Management

Knowledge management was defined as the turning of information into actionable knowledge which can be accessed by people who can apply it. Robbins (2003) gives a time perspective in his definition of knowledge management. He mentions as part of knowledge management the distribution of the right information to the right people at the right time. Lytras et al (2002) gives a definition of knowledge management which emphasises the purpose of knowledge management. In the definition creation of new capabilities, enablement for superior performance, encouraging innovation and enhancement of customer value were mentioned. For the purpose of this study the researcher summarised knowledge management as the intentional process of coordinating people, technology and systems to optimise creation and sharing of intellectual

The superior capabilities of knowledge management systems provide an opportunity for the business to engage the most effective components and recognize the importance of communication to make informed, accurate decisions (McGrath, 2001). This system can organize the company’s knowledge resources, knowledge obtaining, organizing, and applying to make a sound routine the will enforce effectiveness (Niu, 2008). The dynamic function of knowledge management to create, capture, and apply knowledge to achieve an organization’s objective will allow them to be more profitable and successful (Zucker, 1986). In addition to increasing profits, the system can be also used to reduce costs and enhance research and development (DeTienne & Jackson, 2001). With all of these advantages, it would be wasteful for a company to not employ knowledge management. As seen in the Discovery Communications, Inc. example, the company can attribute their new productivity levels and increase in ease of securing documents to the knowledge management system that put into place by Carefree Technology. Like Discovery Communications, Inc., knowledge management is so popular today because companies can collect, process and share knowledge to ignite employees ' creativity which in turn will make the business grow. Wenhong and Jianhua (2009) explained the core of knowledge management is to convert company’s knowledge resources into an increased company

While Knowledge Management (KM) is important in any business however, there is no real agreed upon definition. KM is a concept that includes the

Knowledge management as theoretical and practical concept appeared in the second half of 20th century. With the rapid development of ICT so called ‘knowledge bases’, intranets and computer-supported cooperative work have been actively used in knowledge management process.

In the mid-1990’s, owing to the already widely used internet and the shiftsin business environments, reuse of knowledge has become one of companiescompetitive advantage, because having learned from the past, they are minimizing the chance of committing the same mistakes twice or learned what could have done to maximize benefits. Knowledge management has become an important function for success. As a result KM has

To further develop our analysis, we will now base our argument on the work of Hansen, Nohria and Thierney (1999). They have defined two broad KM strategies that many companies have adopted since: the “codification” based on the re-use of knowledge which is codified, and stored in the form of electronic document systems. Anyone has thus a uniform and easy access to knowledge in the organisation. The other approach described as “personalization strategy” emphasizes the people-to-people knowledge transfer and

Like many emerging business processes rooted in technology, knowledge management is defined somewhat differently by different organizations, and by different individuals within those organizations. Some organizations see knowledge management as

A successful knowledge management strategy happens only when a culture of knowledge sharing is inculcated in the organization. No system or technology, however efficient will help unless every prospective knowledge owner understands this fact.

KM is the name given to the set of systematic actions that an organization can take to obtain the greatest value from the knowledge available to it (Davenport and Prusak, 1998). Systematic means that KM projects are intentional actions in an organizational context. Value means that KM projects are measured according to how KM projects contribute to increased organizational ability (Prieto and Gutierrez 2001; Goldkuhl and Braf 2002). KM as an intentional and value-adding action is not easy to accomplish in practice (Scarbrough and Swan 1999). Scarbrough and Swan present several case studies in KM, successful and unsuccessful in their respective KM project. A major point and lessons from the case studies is that prevalent approaches in KM overstate technology and understate how technology is implemented and applied. The scope of KM encompasses individual competence and organization memory, knowledge creation from tacit to explicit knowledge, including the role of organizations in facilitating the creation of knowledge.

As there is rapid growth in the business sector and information technology in the global market there are many factors which has to be managed and changed with the time in order keep up with the growing technology and knowledge management is one of those important factors. The term knowledge management throws light on the procedure of how knowledge is used in an organization. Thus it includes

The concept of Knowledge Management (KM) had introduced since 1990 (Koenig, 2012). The most quote definition about KM is Davenport (1994)’s definition, “Knowledge management is the process of capturing, distributing and effectively using knowledge”. More specifically, Duhon (1998) defined KM as “a discipline that promotes an integrated approach to identifying, capturing, evaluating, retrieving, and sharing all of an enterprise’s information assets. These assets may include databases, documents, policies, procedures, and previously un-captured expertise and experience in individual workers.”

Knowledge management is a term and a concept which began in the early 1990s. Despite the popular notion that knowledge management only began as a practice with the rise of technology, it has been around as a concept for around 15,000 years. At that time in history, merchants, artisans, doctors, and others first began writing down their knowledge for future generations. In Mesopotamia, roughly 5,000 years ago, people began to have difficulty keeping track of all the clay tablets on which information was written and created the first organized knowledge management solutions, the library (Bergeron 2003). Over the years, even as human advanced technologically, the idea of knowledge management remained. Since the idea of knowledge management arose as a management idea in the 1990s, it has undergone several changes in definition as ideas have changed. First, in 1994, it was defined as “the process of capturing, distributing, and effectively using knowledge.” While this was a very straight forward definition, it had the disadvantage of not including any mention of the human element. Thus, in 1998, the definition was changed to be “a discipline that promotes an integrated approach to identifying, capturing, evaluating, retrieving, and sharing all of an enterprise’s information assets, which may include databases, documents, policies, procedures, and previously un-captured expertise and experience in individual workers.” Finally, as technology has created more of an element of

Apart from the usual definitions, the most important definition of knowledge management is dependent on a comprehensive idea about the Knowledge management systems. According to Jennex (2008), the Knowledge Management systems (KMS) consists of the different components of IT/ICT, users, repositories, processes for using and generation of knowledge, culture for proper utilisation of knowledge, and the initiatives for the goals and measures related to the Knowledge management. The success of KM depends largely upon the success of KMS, as KMS has been regarded as the personification of KM (p.37).

Knowledge Management is defined as the process of capturing, distributing and effectively using knowledge (Davenport, 1994) 1. It can also be refer as a multi-disciplined method in order to accomplish organizational objectives by fully utilized and generate value from their intellectual and knowledge-based assets 6. Knowledge Management focuses on the gaining, creating, and sharing knowledge and technical foundations that support them 2. According to Grey, knowledge management is an audit of “intellectual assets” that highlights unique resources, critical functions and potential deadlocks which prevent knowledge flows to the point of use. It protects intellectual assets from decaying, seeks opportunities to improve decisions, services and products through adding intelligence, increasing value and providing flexibility (Grey , n.d) 5. On top of that, knowledge management includes a range of planning and practices used in an organization to classify, create, distribute and enable adoption of intuitions and experiences.

Knowledge management is a large term and can mean a number of things. For the purpose of this paper, the definition of knowledge management that I will recognize is the creation, development, and sharing of knowledge and information within an organization. However the problem remains, as well as the topic of this paper, exactly how effective is knowledge management in an organization. Furthermore, the key question that I hope to answer in this paper is how the use and development of knowledge can be managed in an organization. Although there are countless pieces of literature on knowledge management itself, and there have been proposals that link knowledge management to a company’s performance, to this date there are very few papers that attempt to measure the effectiveness of knowledge management within an organization. Overall, my objective of this paper is to compare two separate companies and first, find out how to measure the value of knowledge management, and second, find out how beneficial it is to the organization.