Knowledge Management Models

Knowledge is the most valuable asset that needs to be managed properly to achieve its benefits. Knowledge management models give a framework through which the knowledge can be managed. There is wide range of knowledge management models available to create, store and retrieve knowledge within an organization.
Most organizations use the traditional information processing model to share their knowledge which is based on the myths such as “Knowledge management technologies can deliver the right information to the right and to store and retrieve human intelligence”. But the new paradigm proposed by churchman (Malhotra, 2000) which is called as a sense making paradigm of knowledge management emphasize that the “knowledge resides in the user and not in the collection of information it is how the user reacts to a collection of information that matters.” This new paradigm helps the organization to share the knowledge effectively to achieve competitive advantage.
Knowledge management models can be categorized in many ways such as Cognitive Model, Network Model, Community of practice model and Quantum knowledge management models. It also can be to categorized as Knowledge category model and Intellectual capital models
In Cognitive model, the knowledge is considered as an asset and it is considered as something to be managed and accounted SECI (Socialization, Externalization, Combination, and Internalization) Model proposed by Nonaka (Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995) is one of the well-known cognitive models available. In this model the knowledge is categorized as Tacit and Explicit, and it focuses on knowledge conversion within the organization (i.e. Tacit to explicit, explicit to explicit, explicit to tacit, and tacit to tacit). It is mostly considered as more controlling in approach and more focus is given to standardize the knowledge and duplicate it further.
The network model of knowledge management is derived from the network organizations where the knowledge creation and sharing are considered as a main aspect for the organizational learning. Other than these above mentioned models there exist an oldest model of knowledge management which is called a community of practice model where the sense of common enterprise that can bring all together as one social entity to share their knowledge with each other through a shared commitment and the newest development in this field called quantum model which at the same time integrate and interrelate with all the people in the organization to solve more complex problems that can bring great benefits to its stakeholders(Kakabadse et al, 2003).
According to McAdam R. and McCreedy S. (1999) the knowledge category model is used to classify knowledge in to discrete elements and the Scandia Intellectual capital model believe that knowledge management can be isolated into human, customer and growth elements which are part of human and organizational capital. Both Nonaka’s SECI model which has been explained earlier and the Boisot’s model come under the knowledge category model and both of these two models have some similarities where in SECI model knowledge is categorized in to tacit and explicit but in Boisot’s model it is categorized as codified (easily transmittable) , un codified(not easily transmittable) knowledge and diffused(easily shared) , undiffused (not easily shared).
By looking at the SECI model in action in a learning process will help us to understand it further. Socialization is a process, through which the experience, understanding and skills (tacit knowledge) are shared through observations, discussion or by spending time in the same environment. Externalization process which is a key for knowledge creation is where the tacit to explicit knowledge conversion take place. Blog is a good example which supports the externalization process by facilitating to capture personal knowledge and distribute discussions among others which is very useful in a learning process. Combination is a process where tacit to tacit knowledge conversion take place, the captured knowledge is in the form of explicit knowledge which can be shared through blogs and wikis that provide learning repositories that contain more up to date, context rich, easily searchable learning assets and RSS helps to share resources which can facilitate the learning process. Finally through the Internalization process explicit knowledge can be converted to tacit through bringing the learners together more aggressively and supportively through multi user simulation to learn through shared experience. (Chatti et al, 2007).
In Conclusion, although there are many models available in knowledge management, the suitable selection of appropriate model should be adapted or created according to the specific need of an individual or organization.

References

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  Kakabadse, N., Kakabadse, A., Kouzmin, A.(2003), "Reviewing the knowledge management literature: towards a taxonomy", Journal of Knowledge Management, Vol. 7 No. 4, pp.75-91.
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  Malhotra, Y.(2000) ,” Knowledge Management & New Organization Forms: A Framework for Business Model Innovation”, Last accessed 10 April 2009 at: http://www.brint.org/KMNewOrg.pdf.
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  Nonaka tekeuchi(1995),SECI model, Last accessed 11 April 2009 at: http://www.12manage.com/methods_nonaka_seci.html.
• 
  McAdam R. and McCreedy S. (1999),”A critical review of knowledge management models. The Learning Organization”: An International Journal, vol.6, no.3, pp.91-101 accessed on
  11th April 2009.
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  Chatti,M.N, Klamma, R., Jarke, M., and Naeve, A.(2007),” The Web 2.0 Driven SECI Model Based Learning Process ”, Last accessed 14 April 2009 at: http://www-i5.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/i5new/staff/klamma/download/ICALT07_CKJN.pdf
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

Role of Web 2.0 in knowledge Management.

Information Technology plays a key role in knowledge management process. It continuously has a notable impact on its progress. Sharing knowledge from dispersed environment can create lot of inconvenience. Further the trust between the online communities can be damaged due to lack of direct interaction among them. This will prevent people from sharing their knowledge. With the introduction of Web 2.0 technology in the field of knowledge management, the problems can be solved substantially (Wan and Zhao, 2007).

What is Web 2.0?

It is considered as the second phase of the web evolution. In O’Reilly’s view he defines the WEB 2.0 as ‘‘the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the internet as plat form, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform. Chief among those rules is this: Build applications that harness network effects to get better the more people use them’’ (Levy, 2009).

Web 2.0 Technologies

This includes many new technologies, such as (Murugesan, 2007):
Blogs: It is a very strong web based tool that is used to communicate among people through ideas, and comments.

Really Simple syndication (RSS): It is an XML file that are that act as a web feeds that is used to syndicate web contents from web pages.

Wiki: It is a simple and dominant web based system that is used to produce and amend the web contents.

Tags, Folksomony and tag clouds are some of the other technologies.

The following diagram illustrates how these technologies can be integrated in to one Web 2.0 framework (Wan and Zhao, 2007).



Figure 1. The components and ideas of Web 2.0(Wan and Zhao, 2007).

Impact of Web 2.0 in Organization Knowledge Management

The Organizations which have implemented the web 2.0 technologies and tools are referred as enterprise 2.0. Web 2.0 combines technologies, business strategies as well as social trends. Being more dynamic it helps the organization to establish social networks through which the users can share their common interest and helps to gather collective intelligent.
For example the educational institutions like universities uses web 2.0 technologies to share the knowledge among the people who have the common interest. I would like to take one specific technology in Web 2.0 to explain how it can contribute to the Knowledge management process in a given organization.

With the Use of RSS feeds the students can share their subject specific feeds by creating a linking list of all of the subscription lists on a particular topic or a subject area and publish it one central space so all the students who are interested can share and benefit the feeds that others have found.
Other than this a repositories of ‘Learning objects’ can be created to gain reusability is the education. It also helps the educators to share their work and knowledge with others without redoing things that are already available. (D’souza, 2009)
Conclusively, there are many ways the web2.0 helps organizations to share and manage knowledge effectively which can bring endless benefits to the organization.


References:

Murugesan, S., (2007), “Understanding Web 2.0”, IEEE Journal, Vol.9, Issue.4, pp. 34-41.

Wan, L., Zhao C.,(2007), “Construction of a Knowledge Management Framework Based on Web 2.0”, Wireless Communications, Networking and Mobile Computing, 2007. WiCom 2007. International Conference on 21-25 Sept. 2007 Page(s):5341 – 5344.

Levy, M., (2009), “WEB 2.0 implications on knowledge management”, Journal of Knowledge Management, Vol.13, Issue.1, pp. 120-134.

D’souza, Q., “RSS Ideas for Educators”, Available Online: http://teachinghacks.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/01/RSS%20Ideas%20for%20educators111.pdf. [Accessed 10 March, 2009].

Knowledge management in Organizational Context

In this modern era knowledge management plays a key role in many well performing Organizations, therefore most of such organizations taken steps to manage their knowledge base. Most organizations focus on their explicit knowledge which can be easily manageable than the most important Tacit knowledge which is comparatively difficult to manage.

In an Organizational Context Knowledge Management can be defined as a “process of managing organizational knowledge for creating business value and sustaining competitive advantage by creating, communicating, and applying knowledge gained from stakeholder interactions”( Jayam et al,2007). According to (Bollinger and Smith, 2001) it can be defined as “what people know about customers, products, processes, mistakes, and successes”. Organizational knowledge exist is knowledge repositories, and other internal and external sources. Also it can be gained through sharing the experience and best practices among other employees. When the knowledge is shared inside the organization it will gradually increase and become an integral part of Organization’s processes, which can gain competitive advantage to that organization (Bollinger and Smith, 2001).

How Organizations Manage Their Knowledge?

It is possible for an organization to manage their knowledge. But it requires investment; therefore the organization’s management should emphasize the importance of knowledge. Some organizations mainly focus on capturing explicit knowledge but some are keener in having more tacit knowledge.
Many Organizations use different technologies as well as techniques to manage their knowledge. They use different technologies to capture the knowledge. The technologies such as search engines, scanning technology, optical character and voice recognition software, intelligent agents, database management systems, document management systems, and repositories can assist in capturing the knowledge but they cannot create knowledge by themselves (Mullins, 1999). Human participation is very essential in transforming the information in to knowledge.


Further organizations use different other methods to manage their knowledge (Bollinger and Smith, 2001). Knowledge based systems are used to find solutions to the problems by carrying out knowledge processing using expert systems. Intelligent tools are used to predict the user needs and to gather new knowledge from the existing knowledge bases. Other than these methods organizational knowledge can be managed through more traditional means such as cross functional project teams.

Managing knowledge in an organization also has some notable obstacles. Some of the road blocks of managing knowledge are (Fontain and Lesser):

Not supporting Knowledge Management efforts with organization’s high level objectives.
Not Connecting Knowledge management into user’s daily duties.
Not focusing knowledge management efforts outside boundaries of an organization.
Creating knowledge repositories attend to the need to handle the contents.

Most of the obstacles of managing the knowledge effectively in the organization is due to the
Human factor because humans are more complex and they have psychologically different to each other .So for an organization building and managing a large knowledge database is very expensive and time consuming (Bollinger and Smith, 2001).

There are some methods that can be used to tackle this type of problems(Fontain and Lesser):
Communities of practice: the most successful organizations practice community of practice to solve their problem by enabling the employees who have a general way of working to solve the problems by sharing the documents and tools so that they can share the experience and knowledge with each other.
Mentoring programs: This technique helps to share informal knowledge among the employees and it also helps to transfer the tacit knowledge about how to deal in a complex situation. Through this senior employees can achieve better job satisfaction.

Therefore overcoming these barriers of managing the organizational knowledge will help the organization to achieve competitive advantage over other competitors.
References


Jayam, R., Srividya, N., and Priya, M.,(2007),” Role of HR in institutionalizing knowledge management in an Organization”, Proceedings of IET-UK International Conference on Information and Communication Technology in Electrical Sciences (ICTES 2007).

Bollinger, A.S., and Smith, R.D, (2001), “Managing organizational knowledge as a strategic asset”, Journal of Knowledge Management, Vol.5, Issue.1, pp.8 – 18.

Srivastava, B.B., and Majumdar, D.,(2006),” Tapping into organizational knowledge”, Available online:http://www.isa.org/InTechTemplate.cfm?Section=Workforce_Development3&template=/ContentManagement/ContentDisplay.cfm&ContentID=53464 . [Accessed on 31st March 2009].

Mullins, C.S., (1999), “What is knowledge and can it be managed”, Available online:http://www.tdan.com/view-articles/5108. [Accessed on 1st April 2009].

Fontaine, M., and, Lesser, E., “Challenges in managing organizational knowledge”,
Available online:http://www-935.ibm.com/services/in/igs/pdf/g510-3234-00-esr-managing-organizational-knowledge.pdf, .[Accessed on 1st April 2009].

Knowledge Management Systems (KMS) and the Support of IT

Before Understanding what is meant by Knowledge Management System we must know what is Knowledge and Knowledge management. According to nonaka [1994] “Knowledge is a justified personal belief that increases an individual’s Capacity to take effective action.” But according to (Alavi and Leinder, 1999) knowledge is information that is obsessed in an individual’s Mind. Whereas Knowledge Management is a systematic process through which the Tacit and Explicit knowledge is being acquired, organized and communicated.
With the understanding of both knowledge and knowledge management many researchers have defined KMS in many ways. According to Mailer (2007) it is an “Information and communication technology (ICT) system that combines and integrates functions for the contextualized handling of knowledge throughout the organization or that part of the organization that is targeted by a KM initiative”. Also it can be seen as a system that has been developed to support the knowledge management process that include knowledge creation, storage and transfer within an organization. (Alavi and Leinder, 2001). But in a general view it is regarded as the technology that supports the overall execution of the knowledge management systems.
Over several decades many systems have emerged which are supported by Information Technologies to achieve many organizational functions. Such systems are namely Management Information System (MIS) which is used to share information to the management, and Decision support system (DSS) which is help the manger’s in their decision making process (Alavi and Leinder, 1999). In this line the Knowledge management system is emerging systems which assist the managerial activities which involve in creating, gathering, and sharing the organizational knowledge among the stakeholders.

In all the Organizations the Tacit and Explicit knowledge need to be managed properly. Most of the organizations use KMS to manage their explicit knowledge. The most familiar example of such system is known as Enterprise Knowledge Planning System also known as ERP systems (Greenman, 2006). Currently most of the large as well as small organizations use ERP systems to integrate and centralize all the organizational data and information to deliver timely decision and to manage the organizational resources effectively.

Such Type of knowledge management system that support knowledge management processes should be adopted by the strategic management and accepted by all the low level users of the organization (Kaldi et al, 2008). The level of acceptance among the users will affect the value of KMS. This also indicates the value for the investment on such huge projects.

Here I would like to elaborate on a practical example of how the knowledge Management System was successfully implemented in a consultancy firm. In the early 1990s this firm’s strategy “can be stated as “wanting to increase its market share and improve productivity to enable it to become number one amongst the then big companies” (Wickramasinghe, 2002). In order to achieve this long term plan this company adopted newer technologies to develop a Knowledge management system with two major components. The major component called a conference model is developed to support the discussions among the professionals in the organization, and the Library model is developed which has got the collection of knowledge databases which contain the information about the firm. This helped this particular firm to achieve a competitive advantage among other competitors.

Further I would like to share my personal experience on KMS. I was working as a Industrial Engineer for the leading garment manufacturing company in Srilanka who export Leading Brands like M&S and VS to Europe and United States. With the increase in global competition, their main objective was to reduce the lead time in the production. So they introduced the new ERP system called SAP to integrate all their manufacturing plants to a centralized system to share the knowledge among them to cut down the production Lead time. The company provided proper training sessions to all the employees to familiarize the new system to the employees. With the successful implementation of this system the company managed to achieve their objectives and managed to reduce the lead time while increased the total productivity of the Organization.

References

Kaldi, A., Aghaie, A., and Khoshalhan, F.,(2008), “KMS adoption in organizations”, Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management, 2008. IEEM 2008. IEEE International Conference on 8-11 Dec. 2008 Page(s):37 - 41 .
Greenman, M., (2006), “The Contribution of knowledge management systems to interorganizational learning”, Proceedings of the 2006 ACM SIGMIS CPR conference on computer personnel research 2006.

Alavi, M., Leidner, D., (2001) “Review: Knowledge management and knowledge management systems: Conceptual foundations and research issues” In MIS Quarterly, Vol.25 ,Issue 3: pp.107-136.

Alavi, M., Leinder, D., (1999) “Knowledge Management Systems: Emerging Views and Practices from the Field”, Proceedings of the 32nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences 1999.

Ikujiro, N.,(1994) “A Dynamic Theory of Organizational Knowledge Creation ” ,Organization Science, Vol 5, Issue 1, pp. 14-37.

Wickramasinghe, N., (2002), “Practising What We Preach: Are Knowledge Management Systems in Practice Really Knowledge Management Systems?”, Proceedings of the 35th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences – 2002.