The Pros And Cons Of Knowledge Management

According to Davenport et al (1998), Knowledge Management is concerned with exploitation and development of knowledge asset of the organization with a view of the objective of the organization. Knowledge can be managed by explicit, documented knowledge, tacit and subjective knowledge. It also associated with knowledge creation as well as knowledge sharing. Thus, requires systems for creation and maintenance of knowledge repositories to cultivate and to aid knowledge sharing. Organizations that succeed in knowledge management are likely to view knowledge as an asset and to develop organization culture which support knowledge creation and knowledge sharing. Jennifer Rowley (1999) describes the implementation of knowledge management has the importance consequences for structure and culture of the organization, and the roles of managers as well as workers. We can say that knowledge management implementation is crucial as it will lead an organization to be at competitive advantages. There are two types of knowledge mainly explicit knowledge and tacit knowledge. Different people convey their knowledge differently. The philosopher Polanyi (1967) described tacit knowledge as knowing more than we can tell, or knowing how to do something without thinking about it, like ride a bicycle. Tacit knowledge is automatic, requires little or no time or thought and helps to determine how organizations make decision and influence the behavior of their member (Liebowitz and Beckman, 1998). Sternberg (1997) states that tacit knowledge is technical or cognitive as it made up of mental models, values, beliefs, perceptions, insights and assumptions. Technical tacit knowledge demonstrated when people master particular knowledge or skills whereas cognitive tacit knowledge include implicit mental models and perceptions that are ingrained they are taken for granted. Tacit knowledge basically is the “know-how” based on practice, experience and seldom expressed

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

With the benefit of hindsight, it is apparent that in the knowledge era, creating and leveraging knowledge is the business of business. By all available measures, the stock market is already providing handsome rewards to companies that successfully leverage their knowledge--a phenomenon that will almost surely grow in significance as knowledge-based organizations increase in size and number. A number of firms are anticipating this and looking to knowledge management to enhance, measure, and manage the knowledge of their employees and organizations more effectively.

KM is significantly important for organizations in modern economic system, it is also a form of expertise management to administer and incorporate subjective information such as thoughts, insights, ideas and experiences in order to enhance individual knowledge as well as organizational value and corporate culture. (StudyMode, 1999)

Many factors can affect the sharing of knowledge in organizations, such as organizational culture,incentive and trust.

This paper investigates several issues regarding the nature, domain, conceptual foundations, and practical challenges of knowledge management and organizational learning. The paper first identifies and contrasts two fundamental philosophical orientations to knowledge management -- the personal knowledge orientation and

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

In the contemporary corporate cultural based world, a knowledge management system (KMS) is considered an important element to assist the sharing and integration of knowledge within the organization. An effective knowledge management strategy is capable of resolving knowledge management issue arises at any level in the organization (top management-to-bottom management level). A successful KMS also helps in increasing the overall business performance through ensuring staff performance, project management, organizational change management, quality of deliverables and the satisfaction of the staffs and customers. On the other side a lack of implementation of proper knowledge management system may hinder the performance of the staffs and the overall productiveness for the organization.

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

Knowledge management has gained substantial importance in the past few years due to the realisation of numerous advantages associated with efficient knowledge management. An improved decision-making process, considerable increased in productivity and quality, sharing of best practices, less circumstance for reinvention process, and increased development of the skills and talent of the workforce are some of the benefits associated with the knowledge management within the organisations. (Jennex, 2008, p.275). Efficient combination of previously unrelated elements and exchange of tacit knowledge helps in the creation of knowledge that correspondingly leads to appropriate transfer of the gained knowledge transfer (Nahapiet & Ghoshal, 1998). The implementation of knowledge management strategies depends a great deal

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.

The process of collecting, transferring, storing and making information useful is also known as knowledge management. In this, the organization is enabled to grow, adapt to changes and meet customer demands. The information age has a most certain influence on how the organization manages knowledge. This is true of whether that knowledge is unique to the organization, or shared to external organizations. Today there are various ways to collect and compile data and turn that data into useful information; however, without the use of knowledge management, then data, information, and knowledge is lost or misused. Through the knowledge management process the organization has the ability to learn as an organization. This is

Knowledge management system normally acts as a future development planning of any organization (Neeharika, et al., 2013). It develops the system through which the information, knowledge, techniques and methods are shared with the external and internal stakeholders of any organization (Agrawal, 2014). This sharing of knowledge act as a base for the future development and progress of any organization (Gandini, et al., 2014).

In today’s modern day environment, the competition as well as the drive to be one of the best amongst organizations, is consistently increasing, especially after globalization. Due to which many organizations are no longer confined under certain boundaries, but instead are more intermingled. As an outcome, many organizations these days heavily rely on each other for sharing knowledge. Therefore, knowledge management is considered as a valuable component towards the success of an organization.

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.