The
Internet offers in-depth definitions of knowledge management. But in
brief, it is a conscious strategy of getting the right knowledge to the
right person at the right time and helping people share and put
information into action in ways that strive to improve organizational
performance. 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.
The
benefits of KM covers a wide aspect of management practices ranging from boostering human resources through enhancing the organization’s human
intellectual capital to leveraging a company’s competitive market
posture through productive information management and sharing. In this
regard, information technology plays an important role in developing a
KM initiative as it fast-tracks the flow of information. But KM is not
information technology itself. In fact, one of the major risks in
knowledge management programs is the tendency for organizations to
confuse knowledge management with some form of technology, whether it be
Lotus Notes, the World Wide Web, or one of the off-the-shelf technology
tools that are now proliferating. In the process, the essentially
ecological concept of knowledge management becomes degraded into a
simple information system that can be engineered without affecting the
way the work is done. It is not that information systems are bad.
Rather, it is important to recognize that knowledge management is a
different and better way of working which affects people, and
requires social arrangements like communities to enable it to happen on
any consistent and sustained basis.
