Knowledge management (2)

Compiled and Presented by:
Shruti Dasgupta

Content:
 What is Knowledge Management?
 Definitions: Data, Information, Knowledge
 Types of Knowledge
 Knowledge Chain

 Knowledge Management Process
 Knowledge Management Strategy
 Knowledge Management System & Their Types

 Reasons to Practice Knowledge Management
 Benefits of Knowledge Management System

What is Knowledge Management?
 Knowledge management is the leveraging of collective

wisdom to increase responsiveness and innovation.
 KM [Knowledge Management] involves blending a
company’s internal and external information and
turning it into actionable knowledge via a technology
platform.
 KM is an effort to increase useful knowledge within
the organization. Ways to do this include encouraging
communication, offering opportunities to learn, and
promoting the sharing of appropriate knowledge
artifacts.

Data, Information & Knowledge
 Data: it may be defined as the facts or observations or

perceptions; it represents the raw numbers or assertions
available.
 Information: Data that has been organized within a context
and translated into a form that has structure and meaning.
 Knowledge: Knowledge is the combination of data and
information, to which is added expert opinion, skills and
experience, to result in a valuable asset which can be used
to aid decision-making Knowledge will remain information
unless attitudes, systems, and skills exist to retrieve the
information and share it in a new context

 For example:
 DATA:- 32: 3: 15: 2000
 INFORMATION: 32 new

cases of tuberculosis have
been reported in the last
three months which is up
from 15 from the same time
in 2000.

 KNOWLEDGE: You know

this trend is alarming and
signals a need to understand
it and take corrective action.

Types of Knowledge
 Explicit knowledge: it is knowledge that is

articulated in formal language and easily transmitted
among individuals both synchronously and
asynchronously.
 Tacit knowledge: it is the personal knowledge
embedded in individual experience and involving such
intangible factors as personal belief, perspective,
instinct, and values.
 Implicit Knowledge: it is that knowledge whose
meaning is not explicitly captured, but can be inferred
in effect, the codification process is incomplete.

Comparison of Tacit and Explicit
Knowledge:

The Knowledge Chain:
 Internal Awareness: In its simplest terms, internal

awareness is the ability of an organization to quickly assess
its inventory of skills and core competency. It is the
awareness of past history in terms of talent, know-how,
interaction, process performance, and communities of
practice.
 Internal Responsiveness: it is the ability to exploit
internal awareness. An organization may be well aware of
its strengths and market demand, but if it is not able to
adequately effect change within itself quickly enough to
meet market requirements, its competencies are virtually
moot.

 External Responsiveness: it is the ability to best meet the

requirements of the market. When all is said and done, an
organization’s ability to better satisfy this cell in the
knowledge chain than its competitors will determine its
success or failure. External responsiveness is measured by
the ability to effectively respond to opportunities and
threats outside of the organization in a timely manner.
 External Awareness: it is the mirror image of internal
awareness. It is the organization’s ability to understand how
the market perceives the value associated with its products
and services, to understand who are its customers, what
those customers want, who are their competitors,
competencies of competitors, market trends, competitive
actions, government regulations, and any other relevant
market forces that exist outside the organization itself.

Knowledge Management Process:
 Generation/Creation
 Capture/Retention
 Transfer
 Utilization

Knowledge Management Strategy
Culture: Organizational culture can be defined as the learned way of perceiving,
thinking and feeling, shared and transmitted among organizational members.
It is a social / behavioral manifestation comprising such features as:
 The values and beliefs of staff
 How people are and feel rewarded, organized, and controlled
 The work orientation of staff, the way work is organized and experienced
 The degree of formalization, standardization and control through systems
 How authority is exercised and distributed
 The value placed on various functions within the organization
 How much scope for individuality and creative expression, risk-taking and
initiative is given
 Notions and concepts on the importance and use of time and space
 The organizational rites, rituals and stories
 Organizational “language”.

Content: This element represents the knowledge to be managed. “Data,
information, skills, and expertise can be thought of as the content resources of
an organization”. Organizations often create content on an ad-hoc basis,
without the procedures to make the information accessible to employees. But,
making content electronically available does not necessarily make it useful.
Data may need to be reformatted, translated or integrated to optimize use. Any
KM system has three critical activities related to content:
 Collecting the content - should come from both internal and external sources.
 Using the content – including the technology for finding, accessing and
delivering the content to users (e.g., search engines).
 Managing the content – organizing it through taxonomies. Key concerns for
managing content:
1.
Collecting the right content
2.
Finding sources for content
3.
Selecting the best technology to deliver the content
4.
Developing ways to organize the content
5.
Establishing processes to manage the content

Process: The processes to support KM are vital to its success. KM
processes are the activities or initiatives you put in place to enable and
facilitate the creation, sharing and use of knowledge for the benefit of
your organization. Processes also refer to your organization’s general
infrastructure and ways of doing things and the extent to which these
act as enablers of, or barriers to, good KM practice. The key steps in the
process of KM most commonly include the following:
 Establish standards for the KM system
 Conduct knowledge audits to identify existing knowledge needs,
knowledge resources and knowledge flows
 Create a structure for classifying knowledge
 Create a KM strategy to guide the overall approach, including specific
objectives that contribute to the organization’s overall goals and ideally
can be measured in the evaluation of the strategy.
 Market the opportunities for knowledge exchange ensuring they are
relevant to the needs of the users.

 Connect people with people to share tacit knowledge using approaches


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such as communities of practice or learning events.
Connect people with information to share explicit knowledge using
approaches such as best practices databases and content management
processes to ensure that explicit knowledge is current, relevant and
easily accessible.
Create opportunities for people to generate new knowledge, for
example through collaborative working and learning.
Introduce processes, such as peer assists, to help people seek and use
the knowledge of others.
Teach people to use storytelling techniques as an inspiring way to share
knowledge.
Encourage people to prioritize learning as part of their day-to-day work
-- before, during and after the tasks and projects they have performed
Continually monitor the fit between the processes used and their
usefulness and effectiveness for the user.

Technology: it is an essential component as it involves responding to the
knowledge needs of staff, partners and clients by using appropriate technology
to offer easy access at the point of need. Technology aids in the transition of
data from information, to knowledge and ultimately to wisdom. Types of
enabling technology tools include:
 Knowledge bases (content management tools)
 Access to expertise (many incorporated into e-mail tools)
 eLearning spaces (ranging from interactive collaboration tools such as
Blackboard to learning management systems)
 Synchronous interactions (online Web meetings)
 Discussion groups
 Web site communities (linking people to people as well as to documents)
 Project spaces (many of which are linked to Outlook e-mail and incorporate
shared folders and project management tools)
 Knowledge workers’ desktop tools (customizable Web portals).

Knowledge Management System
 KMS systems deal with information, so they are a class of

information system and may build on, or utilize other
information sources.
 A KM system could be any of the following:
1. Document based i.e. any technology that permits creation/
management/ sharing of formatted documents such
as web, distributed databases etc.
2. Based on AI technologies which use a customized
representation scheme to represent the problem domain.
3. Provide network maps of the organization showing the flow of
communication between entities and individuals
4. Increasingly social computing tools are being deployed to
provide a more organic approach to creation of a KM system.

 A KMS offers integrated services to deploy KM instruments

for networks of participants, i.e. active knowledge workers,
in knowledge-intensive business processes along the entire
knowledge life cycle.
 A KMS can be used for a wide range of cooperative,
collaborative, adhocracy and hierarchy communities,
virtual organizations, societies and other virtual networks,
to manage media contents; activities, interactions and
work-flows purposes; projects; works, networks,
departments, privileges, roles, participants and other active
users in order to extract and generate new knowledge and
to enhance, leverage and transfer in new outcomes of
knowledge providing new services using new formats and
interfaces and different communication channels.

Types of Knowledge Management
Systems:
 Expert Systems
 Knowledge directories
 Data Warehouses
 Workflow Systems

 Groupware and Collaborative Systems

Expert System
 The basic components of an expert system are a knowledge base

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(KB), an inference engine and user inference.
The information to be stored in the KB is obtained by
interviewing people who are expert in the area in question.
The interviewer, or knowledge engineer, organizes the
information elicited from the experts into a collection of rules,
typically of an 'if-then' structure. Rules of this type are called
production rules. The inference engine enables the expert system
to draw deductions from the rules in the KB.
The user inference requests information from the user and
outputs intermediate and final results.
In some expert systems, input is acquired from additional
sources such as data bases and sensors.

Knowledge Directories
 Knowledge directories are structures where pieces of

knowledge are placed in a proper folder or in
categories of a hierarchical tree.
 The idea originates directly from the directory
structure of organizations in operational systems.
Such directories are typically shared among multiple
users.
 The purpose of using knowledge directories is to
persist, share and categorize knowledge.

Data Warehouse and Workflow
System
 Data warehouse is a kind of a database which maintains a copy of

the transaction data. But in contrast to the original data base this
data is “specifically structured for query and analysis”.
 A Workflow process contains the specification of a set of
activities and the specific order according to which they should
be executed in order to achieve a common goal . This
specification can be modeled as a workflow graph. A workflow
system can be based on a formal description of business
processes. Software components can execute this description and
take care of the state of processes executions, including recovery
and reporting. Workflow systems can be used to support
efficient cooperation between persons, software applications and
machines taking a part in processes.

Groupware and Collaborative
Systems
 Groupware (also referred to as collaborative software or

workgroup support system) is a technology designed to facilitate
the work of groups.
 This technology may be used to communicate, cooperate,
coordinate, solve problems, compete, or negotiate.
 Groupware systems allow users to overcome common problems
which emerge during teamwork. They are especially well suited
for a non-collocated teams.
 Groupware services include the sharing of calendars, collective
writing, email handling, shared database access, electronic
meetings with each person able to see and display information to
others, and other activities. Sometimes called collaborative
software, groupware is an integral component of a field of study
known as Computer-Supported Cooperative Work.

Reasons to Practice KM
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Increase in core competencies of the organization.
Succession Planning
Translating knowledge into policy and action
Sharing and reapplying experiential knowledge
It helps in identifying functional gaps
Making available increased knowledge content in the development and
provision of products and services
Achieving shorter new product development cycles.
Leveraging the expertise of people across the organization
Increasing network connectivity between internal and external
individuals
Solving intractable or wicked problems
Managing intellectual capital and intellectual assets in the workforce

Knowledge management (2)

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