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].