Strategic Importance of Knowledge Management

This chapter describes what is knowledge management in details as well as what is the factors of implementing knowledge management which are implementing best practices, network expansion, systematic information system infrastructure, good organizational culture, senior management leadership and commitment and trustworthiness of teamwork.

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: It is the process of management techniques and tools disseminating knowledge with in an organization. There are two main types of knowledge.

Knowledge management is defined by Sallis and Jones (2002), as “a systemic method for managing individual, group and organisational knowledge using the appropriate means and technology”. In short, it involves various fields of expertise in achieving organisational objectives by making the best use of knowledge at the same time.

Since the mid-1990s, knowledge management has become increasingly significant for business managers and companies. ‘It is broadly accepted that systematic knowledge management is tightly linked with gaining and sustaining competitive advantage.’ (Bogner & Bansal, 2007, p658-6 as cited in Hislop, 2009, p1) The definition of knowledge management is various because of the wide range of this concept and its complexity (Al-Hawamdeh, 2003). For example, the broad definition provided by McAdam and McCreedy (2000, p155 as cited in Hislop 2009, p53) note that: ‘KM relates to the management of anything classified as knowledge’ Furthermore, Hislop (2009, p59)

There are two dominant streams of research on knowledge management in modern academic literature: the resource-based and the process-based. The first stream focuses mainly on the increase of knowledge stock and there use of knowledge repositories (Barney, 1991; Kamara et al., 2002). Knowledge management is viewed as a developing system of techniques and values by the means of which organization effectively acquires and uses its intellectual assets (Snowden, 1999).

Knowledge Management (KM) is described as a systematic process of sharing, reusing and managing the knowledge only when it is made available and recorded (Jashapara, 2005). This helps an organization to gain insight and understanding for own experience (Remus, 2012). Most of the KM activities

In a knowledge organization, defined by Bergeron (2003) as “corporations that take a systematic approach to capturing information”, knowledge and knowledge workers are treated as the organization’s most valuable asset. Therefore, the sharing of knowledge between employees is essential in knowledge management. But how does an organization make this work? In order for a knowledge management program to be successfully applied, several key factors must be considered: employees, leadership, application of information technology (to be discussed in later section), and most important of all, knowledge.

At the present time, organizations do not compete merely on the grounds of financial resources and tangible assets, rather knowledge is the new competitive advantage in business. According to Omotayo (2015), there is popular saying that knowledge is power. depending on this claim, it can be said that knowledge management is the key to power.

Recent empirical studies have found support for the direct impact of knowledge on performance (e.g., Applyard, 1996; Decarolis and Deeds, 1999; Yeoh and Roth, 1999), Vera and Crossan (2003) suggest that the conclusion from these studies is not that more knowledge leads to greater performance, but the knowledge that is relevant may have positive effects on the organization performance. Therefore, knowledge management (KM) has been introduced to manage the relevant 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.”

Hewlett Packard (HP) is a leading multinational organization providing products and services in many IT related technologies such as computer hardware and software, printers, scanners, storage devices etc. In 1995, the company decided to introduce knowledge management in its organization that will make its systems, processes, outcomes superior with organized and systematic knowledge handling and storage. HP faces severe competition and thus has to be ahead of the market using many strategies, one of which is application of Knowledge Management (KM). With over 600 business units located

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.