Can Organisational Knowledge be managed?

Organisations have entered new context of knowledge. Since we are in knowledge age, organisations keen on organisational knowledge management to gain competitive advantage.
Organisational knowledge is not a set of information than can easily store but it is collection of all individual’s knowledge who works in organisation. According to Ticha & Hron (2006) knowledge can not be stored easily but in order to have long time success, knowledge should be stored. Organisational knowledge contributes all the stakeholders’ knowledge. Those stakeholders are not there forever. Especially workers, they are leaving the organisation with their knowledge. In order to prevent this incident organisation should identify where the knowledge is? And how continuously use existing knowledge?
In traditional organisations workers did not have any freedom to implement their ideas. In this case knowledge was not shared only the top of the hierarchy shared the knowledge and lower level should listen what ever top level said they did not had a chance to question back (Switzer, 2008)
According to my experience I totally agree with the Switzer because when I was working in the government organisation which had hierarchical structure there was no chance to come up with the new idea. More that 17,000 employees were there but only few decision makers. What a knowledge waste? They did not identify “knowledge workers” (Switzer, 2008) within the organisation and they did not have any freedom to do their task according to there knowledge. Instead of I questioned from management, they questioned me and asked why did you do in such a way without using traditional way?
Customer is also very important role in organisational knowledge management. Customers also have some knowledge which is important for the organisation. Organisation should understand which knowledge should transfer with whom. For example if it has frequent customer interactions like ATM machine in a bank so then organisation should know which knowledge should transfer to customers.
Even though knowledge management is complex (Zack, 1998) it can be decompose into simple fragments. Instead of saying tacit to explicit or tacit to tacit it is possible to identify which knowledge exactly to be transferred, and why that knowledge should transfer. According to above example because customers should know the use of ATM machine and from bank point of view in order have competitive advantage in market, customers should know how to operate ATM.
When consider about organisational knowledge management one can not forget culture which is act major role in context of management. NASA organisation’s procedure is ‘go ahead’ they take maximum risk without any hesitate if mission fail it will not effect to the operational people they still can make use of knowledge and oppose with new creative ideas (Balthazard and Cooke, 2004). Organisational culture affect when knowledge workers explicit their tacit knowledge. For example when we use one of the agile method call Extreme Programming, there is pair programming. In this case one look on the others coding in real time which is more effective in software product but some programs does not like have one colleague beside him and correct his errors.
Conclusion
Yes, Organisational knowledge can be managed. First should be identified individual’s knowledge about specific field that he is working. Workers have more freedom of doing the job in their own way then the tacit knowledge become explicit. Then it is possible to identify the best practice of each and every task of the organisation and convert into documentary format so called “knowledge repositories” (Rowley, 2002). Then it has become a tangible asset for the organisation. According to Moteleb and Woodman (2009) repositories or intranet is not the best way to store knowledge. Organisational knowledge management can not freeze it should be an iterative process because knowledge is being created all the time. The importance of this knowledge storing is that if current employees have resigned then the new employees can enhance the organisational knowledge with the past experience of the organisation because it can be stored not as documents but using web 2.0 technology such as wikis or blogs. Then it can be easily withstand with iterative change of knowledge.

References:
Balthazard, P. A. and Cooke, R. A., (2004), “Organisational Cultural and Knowledge Management Success: Assessing The Behaviour – Performance Continuum”, 37th Hawaii International Conference on system science – 2004. Available at http://www.thestep.gr/trainmor/dat/%7B8a7c6309-2338-4a07-b413-8854a235f4f8%7D/article.pdf [Last accessed 01/04/2009]

Moteleb, A. and Woodman, M., (2009), “Uncovering a KMSD approach from Practice”, International Journal of knowledge management, 1-14, Available at: http://xplore.k4b.net/_attachments/4111669/Moteleb%20%20Woodman%20Uncovering%20KMSD%20EJKM%20V3(MW).pdf, [last accessed 31/03/2009]

Rowely, J., (2002), “Eight questions for customers knowledge management in e- business”, journal of knowledge management, 6(5), 500-511. Availble at: http://www.emeraldinsight.com/Insight/ViewContentServlet;jsessionid=1E22F4DF40739563AA658F8F232AF65F?contentType=Article&Filename=Published/EmeraldFullTextArticle/Articles/2300060508.html, [last accessed 26/03/2009]

Switzer, C., (2008), “Time change: empower working organisations to succeed in the knowledge management economy”, Journal of knowledge management, 12(2), 18-28

Ticha, I. and Hron, J., (2006) “Knowledge in the business strategy context”, 7-11, Available at: http://www.cazv.cz/attachments/AE_52_7-11.pdf, [last accessed 29/03/2009]

Zack, M. H., (1998), “If managing knowledge is the solution, then what is the problem?”, Knowledge Management and Business Model Innovation. Available at http://web.cba.neu.edu/~mzack/articles/fourprob/fourprob.htm [Last accessed 27/03/2009]