Knowledge Management is about storing and sharing
Knowledge is a vital factor of HR in an organization. It mean that human capital in a company is part of intellectual capital. Knowledge Management can be defined as ‘any process or practice of creating, acquiring, capturing, sharing and using knowledge, wherever it resides, to enhance learning and performance in organizations’.
Knowledge Management focuses on the organization-specific body of knowledge and skills that result from the organizational learning processes and is concerned with both flow of knowledge and the making of profits. ‘Knowledge Flow’ represents the ways in which knowledge is transferred from people to people, or from people to a knowledge database. Knowledge Management is intended to capture an organization’s collective expertise and distribute it to “wherever it can achieve the biggest payoff”.
Knowledge Management is about storing and sharing the accumulated collective understanding and expertise within an organization regarding its processes, techniques and operations. Because it treats knowledge as a key resource Knowledge Management is a key component of intellectual capital, which allows HR practitioners to influence the area of people management.
One of the major requirements for Knowledge Management is to integrate the link between people management practices and organizational performance in professionally-run organizations. The organization has to monitor how HR contributes to the creation of tangible value in the form of knowledge-based outputs. For instance, in professional service organizations, the knowledge held by their staff is the key to the development of intellectual capital. Such organizations “sell their people because of the value they add to their clients”.
Though the concept of Knowledge Management is of recent origin, interest in it has grown rapidly with the development of information technology (IT). Accordingly, a Knowledge Management system will require carefully prepared, structured management information systems (MIS) in which information is recorded, stored and made available to those who need it.
The essence of Knowledge Management then, is the need to have designated ‘knowledge developers’ to design the computer software to control the knowledge database, and the ‘learning options’ that will guide users in finding, at any given time, information that will serve their personal development and work needs.
KM infrastructural capabilities have a significant positive effect on KM success
IT has been identified by a number of studies as a major determinant of KM success (e.g. Purvis et al., 2001). The quality and speed of knowledge transfer, for example, is considerably improved with the support of technologies (Ruggles, 1998). Common IT applications employed by firms include intranets, knowledge repositories and group decision support systems. KM tools can be classified into three general categories: generation, codification, and transfer (Ruggles, 1997). Knowledge generation requires tools that enable the acquisition, synthesis, and creation of knowledge.
Knowledge codification tools support the representation of knowledge so that it can be accessed and transferred. The capabilities of these tools vary depending on the targeted knowledge – i.e., process knowledge, factual knowledge, catalog knowledge, and cultural knowledge – and on whether that knowledge is explicit or tacit. Types of codification tools include knowledge bases, knowledge maps, organizational thesaurus/dictionaries, and simulators. Knowledge transfer tools alleviate the temporal, physical, and social distances in knowledge sharing. An alternative framework for classifying KM tools and technologies consists of five categories: business intelligence, collaboration, transfer, expertise, and discovery / mapping. Such frameworks can help organizations to select the appropriate technology for a given KM task.