I would like to describe "Knowledge management" as it means by two words those are what is knowledge and what is management. Knowledge is interpretation of information as individuals according to their capacity(Thilina, 2009).read more. Management is an activity that arranges resources in order to get desire outcome.
Considering knowledge and management separately we can have an idea of knowledge management as a phrase. Knowledge is the recourse that is being managed. Let's see What is knowledge management? and Can knowledge be managed?
Since we are in knowledge age there are gurus for knowledge management and most of them define knowledge management in different aspects those are mainly organisational, economical, technical and IT.
Knowledge management is the most efficient way of secure knowledge in order to achieve the organisations success using the maximum of the knowledge assets (wiig, 1997). He is emphasis on knowledge personal knowledge, knowledge creation and knowledge transfer. As I experienced those are essential in terms of knowledge management.
Switzer (2008) also have the same kind of definition about the knowledge management and he came a cross some interesting literature such as “Knowledge Age”, ”Knowledge manager”, ”Knowledge Worker”, and ”Knowledge Reader” He is Describe knowledge management in practical terms. Interesting thing that I found in this article was he said that in order to secure on knowledge management is not successful to apply on hierarchical structured organisations it should me reorganise in order to gain maximum harvest of knowledge. (Switzer, 2008)
Considering definitions of Hicks et al (2006), Joseph et al (2005) they also came up with similar ideas and literature such as creation, utilization, sharing, and codification and so on. Even if most of the experts think in similar manner T.D. Wilson has different perspective of knowledge management.
Knowledge can not be managed only the information can be managed (Wilson, 2002). He further mentioned that so called knowledge management is only another term like 'team-building' , 'cultural change' , 'strategic information systems', 'benchmarking' but people do nothing on it. read more
I was working on a BPO project for three months of period and it was a hierarchical organisation. We were as employees had to listen what our headman said, In that organisation management not fully benefited from employees in terms of knowledge management because they did not listen to lower level thoughts of structure. Still we did knowledge management in our level. We were the people who doing the task so we got together discussed the trouble-free ways of achieving our goals. This means we did community of practice without knowing the phase. We share our knowledge and did the task up to the expectation. As far as goal was achieved headman do not worry how we could did that.
I have supported Switzer (2008) article with this experience, actually organisation did not recognise knowledge worker. If company did that our knowledge could be shared amount the every one of the organisation and made out of most of the knowledge and also can apply knowledge management model in practice. I suggest it should be reorganised as a flat structure organisation rather than hierarchical organisation.
Aslo I agree with the wiig(1997) because because as in this scenario we shared, transferred and finally we created knowledge to achieve given task.
As far as concern on the individuals' knowledge I agree with the Wilson’s (2002) thoughts. According to me he had only thought about individual knowledge management. Yes, it can not be managed, because as individuals we create knowledge in day today life even when we are walking on the road. We are not able to manage all the knowledge we have in our mind. Some times we have knowledge that retrieves on moment such as an accident which may happen once in a life time. Did we manage this knowledge to come out in particular moment? No, even we do not know we had that kind of knowledge Wilson (2002).
Organisations do knowledge management by sharing individuals’ knowledge. I disagree with the Wilson’s position when we come to organisations. Because organisation has a specific goal to achieve and they have a strategy for that goal, more importantly there is more than one person. In such a scenario we should manage our knowledge in order to gain full use of the employees of the organisation.
Can knowledge be managed?
Yes, knowledge can be managed. There are knowledge management models, life cycles and frame works those stuffs make lives easy for knowledge management but again it depends on the situation. I think it is much effective in the small organisations rather than the huge organisations (in terms of employees).
For an example in our module itself does knowledge management. Last year there were only 23 students (If I am right)and they posted four articles for their course work 1 and also they had comments regularly from our module leaders. I feel that they went though knowledge management model tacit to explicit, explicit to explicit and explicit to tacit. Students convert their tacit knowledge to explicit and then discuss on the class with the module leaders (explicit to explicit) and from feedbacks and class discussions helps to convert explicit to tacit knowledge and again re write the article (tacit to explicit) that went as a never ending loop.
In this year we have the same course work same marks but only three articles with one week feedback. Does it make any difference?
It may be, Module leaders changed the knowledge management application according to the situation but still it effects to the organisation. My point of view marking three rather four will effect on student knowledge and again late feedbacks effect to the productivity of the articles.
But according to the situation organisation has done maximum, they have analyse the current situation and changed the strategy more or less and also just did the adjustment on knowledge management application.
Finally I can say larger the organisation, slender the knowledge management.
References:
Hick, R.C., Dattaro, R. and Gaulp S.D. (2006), The five-tier knowledge management hierarchy, Journal of Knowledge Management, 10(1): 10-31
Joseph G. Davis, G.J, Eswaran Subrahmanian, E and Arthur W. Westerberg, A.W., (2005), The ‘‘global’’ and the ‘‘local’’ in knowledge
Management, Journal of Knowledge Management, 9(1): 101-110
Switzer, C. (2008), Time for change: empowering organizations
to succeed in the knowledge economy, Journal of knowledge management, 12(2): 18-25
Thilina, K.V. (January, 2009),What is Data, Information and Knowledge. Last accessed 07 February 2009 at:http://thilinakm.blogspot.com/2009/01/what-is-datainformation-and-knowledge.html
Wiig, K.M. (1997), Knowledge Management: An Introduction and Perspective, The Journal of Knowledge Management, 1(1): 6-14
Wilson, T.D. (2002) The nonsense of ‘knowledge management’, Information research, volume 8, No.1, Last accessed 4 February 2009 at: http://informationr.net/ir/8-1/paper144.html
Hi Thilina
ReplyDeleteThe way you presented the definitions of km given by different management gurus is awesum. And you even told that knowledge can be managed and gave a nice example on how it has been implemented. These real life examples made me to interpret as such how this can be done. Thank you and waiting for ur next article curiously
Very good points on this article.
ReplyDelete1. With regard to Wilson where he says that knowledge cannot be managed, only information can, I wish to add my comment. It is tacit knowledge that cannot be managed and not explicit. But even then, tacit knowledge can be managed remotely in a crude way. Suppose you as an employer give special incentives to those who work smarter. Employees will use all efforts at their disposal to get such incentives. Thus in a way, you will have managed (or is it manipulated)their tacit knowledge
2. I feel you have confused two things in the paragraph where you mentioned 23 students. Tacit and explicit are terms used to explain different types of knowledge, and not KM. In other words, there is a difference between knowledge and KM.
Thank you for your comment Richard, Yes I agree with you those terms explain knowledge and not KM I tried to emphasis in order to do knowledge management we use knowledge management models,
ReplyDeleteDo you think Knowledge sharing, utilizing and creation are not in KM?
Those three factors are there in my example. In our class we share our knowledge with module leader and prof.Mark and also within colleagues, and knowledge is being created by our selfs and also we utilize that knowledge to produce high quality articles by arguing with the knowledge management guru's.
you done a very gud wotk on how knowledge is being managed, however i would like to ask u one thig on yours stament that,knowledge can easily managed in smaller organisation, i agree with it but do u think is going to be difficul in managing knowledge in larger firms.
ReplyDeleteManaging a career is ongoing. It's always up to you to judge where you want to go with your career. There are lots of job openings for new skills. So find your interests and develop your skills to achieve
ReplyDelete