knowledge moment

BBA212 Knowledge Management

Week 1 - Presentation of the Knowledge Management Economy I

Introduction to the course

To master the management of knowledge is the key to success.

This course provides a critical and practical vision on Knowledge Management (KM) for business administration

students. In the knowledge-based economy, knowledge equals competitive advantage. In the present knowledge-

based economy, successful small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) have become more intelligent, more

adaptive and manage to compete locally and globally.

Many SMEs now consider that their main assets are not so much physical as they are intangible. A company is more

knowledgeable by successfully managing its intangible assets such as intellectual capital, including intellectual

property (IP) assets. In this kind of economic environment, an SME's knowledge has become synonymous to

competitive advantage.

Course objectives

• Explain that strategic and tactical business decisions are based on an efficient and effective management

information system as well as on effective information management.

• Focus on the importance to secure the Information Technology and Information System of an organization.

• Understand how companies can develop competitive advantages when their strategy provides for clear

problematics and knowledge extraction from data.

• Understand that the value proposition developed by the organization needs to be protected

What is knowledge?

In everyday usage, knowledge refers to awareness of or familiarity with various objects, events, ideas, or ways of

doing things. But, as philosophers have noted for centuries, things get complicated fairly quickly. Consider, for

example, the question: What is real? Is the coke bottle on my desk real? Are the trees outside my window real? What

about the number pi? What about the pain from the slight cut on my finger? As one ponders these questions, they

quickly give rise to the question of how do I come to know things in the first place?

Separating the "How" from the "What" of Knowledge

With some reflection, it becomes clear that, at least to some extent, what is real for me depends in part on how I come

to know things. For example, my perceptual, cognitive background structures allow me to experience and understand

the Coke bottle on my desk in a particular way; different perceptual or cognitive background structures would result in

a different reality. This point was well made in the 1980 film, The Gods Must Be Crazy, which tells the story of the

dramatic impact a Coke bottle dropped by a passing airplane had on an isolated tribe in the Kalahari Desert.

The tribesmen interpreted the bottle as a gift from the gods, and the film tracked how that meaning permeated the tribe

and impacted its members. This brief example highlights the two broadest angles philosophers take regarding

knowledge, which is that of “epistemology” and “ontology.” Ontology refers to the question of reality and is about

determining what can be said to really exist in the world. In contrast, epistemology refers to how we humans know

things. A “theory of knowledge” would explain what knowledge was, how humans could come to know things, what

truly existed in the world, and the complicated relationship between the two.

What is Knowledge Management?

Knowledge management is the conscious process of defining, structuring, retaining and sharing the knowledge and

experience of employees within an organization.

The main goal of knowledge management is to improve an organization's efficiency and save knowledge within the

company.

Often it is referring to training and learning in an organization or of its customers. It consists of a cycle of creating,

sharing, structuring and auditing knowledge, in order to maximize the effectiveness of an organization’s collective

knowledge.

3 main areas of knowledge management

1. Accumulating knowledge

2. Storing knowledge

3. Sharing knowledge

The goal is to enable organizational learning and create a learning culture, where the sharing of knowledge is

encouraged and those who seek to learn to better themselves find it easy to do so.

When thinking about knowledge management, it is helpful to consider the types of knowledge and how possible it is

to share that knowledge within an organization.

Tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge - are the two main types of knowledge covered within the definition of

knowledge management.

• Tacit knowledge is more intuitive, less easy to package and share with others. Examples of tacit

knowledge are innovative thinking and understanding body language.

• Explicit knowledge is information that is easily codified and taught, such as how to change the toner

in a printer and mathematical equations.

Successful knowledge management will improve an organization in several ways. It will ensure that the specialized

knowledge of employees does not leave with them, or go unutilized by other employees who would benefit from that

knowledge.

It allows for better situational awareness, as well as opening doors for learning about best practices, lessons learned,

and overall organizational improvement.

Why is knowledge management important?

Knowledge management is important because it boosts the efficiency of an organization’s decision-making ability.

In making sure that all employees have access to the overall expertise held within the organization, a smarter

workforce is built who are more able to make quick, informed decisions that benefit the company.

Innovation is easier to foster within the organization, customers benefit from increased access to best practices and

employee turnover is reduced.

The importance of knowledge management is growing every year. As the marketplace becomes ever more

competitive, one of the best ways to stay ahead of the curve is to build your organization in an intelligent, flexible

manner. You want to be able to spot issues from a distance and respond quickly to new information and innovations.

Companies begin the knowledge management process for many different reasons.

1. A merger or acquisition could spur the need for codifying knowledge and encouraging teams to share

their expertise.

2. The imminent retirement of key employees could demonstrate the need to capture their knowledge.

3. An upcoming recruitment drive shows the wisdom in using knowledge management to assist in the

training of new employees.

Knowledge creation at the level of the individual, group and organization

Communities of learning

Organizations gain knowledge in one of the four organizational communities of learning: individual, team,

organizational, and inter-organizational. Organizational learning "involves the process through which organizational

communities (e.g. groups, departments, divisions) change as a result of experience." An example of organizational

learning is a hospital surgical team learning to use new technology that will increase efficiency

Individual learning is the smallest community at which learning can occur. An individual learns new skills or ideas,

and their productivity at work may increase as they gain expertise. The individual can decide whether or not to share

their knowledge with the rest of the group. If the individual leaves the group and doesn't share their knowledge before

leaving, the group loses this knowledge. In their study of software development, Boh, Slaughter and Espinosa (2007)

found that individuals were more productive the more specialized experience they had with a certain system.

Group learning is the next largest community There are conflicting definitions of group learning among researchers

studying it. One belief is that group learning is a process in which a group takes action, gets feedback, and uses this

feedback to modify their future action. Another belief is that group learning happens when a member shares their

individual knowledge with other group members. Others have suggested that group learning is primarily a process of

error detection and correction or that group learning is primarily about the processes of interpretation and

integration. Once this happens, individual learning turns into group learning. Reagans, Argote, and Brooks (2005)

studied group learning by examining joint-replacement surgery in teaching hospitals. They concluded that "increased

experience working together in a team promoted better coordination and teamwork." Working together in a team also

allowed members to share their knowledge with others and learn from other members. To sum up the different

definitions cover following aspects: task independence (what one group member does affects and is affected by

another group member); social psychological awareness (members perceive themselves as a group and are perceived

as a group); and social embeddedness (the group exists in a larger social system).

Organizational learning is the way in which an organization creates and organizes knowledge relating to their

functions and culture. Organizational learning happens in all of the organization's activities, and it happens in different

speeds. The goal of organizational learning is to successfully adapt to changing environments, to adjust under

uncertain conditions, and to increase efficiency. According to Argote (1993), managers in manufacturing plants saw

organization learning occur when they found ways to make individual workers more proficient, improve the

organization's "technology, tooling, and layout," improve the organization's structure, and determine the organization's

strengths.

Formulating knowledge

The knowledge management strategy is a plan, which describes the process which an organization should follow to

manage its information and knowledge. The knowledge management process is always aligned with the strategy,

goals, and objectives of the organization.

To implement a successful KM program, we have to follow three basic steps.

• Create an objective list of the opportunities which will be addressed by the Knowledge management program.

• Provide the best answers to the questions about the process, people, and technology.

• Define Knowledge management strategy for the personal Knowledge management program.

Tips to Make an Effective Knowledge Management Strategy

1. Make a mind map - Making a mind map is one of the best ways to organize your thinking, which is most famous

for creating a knowledge management strategy. As we know, the mind map is a graphic organizer, and you need to

understand the essential elements of mind mapping.

Drawing a mind map is an effortless task that does not require any complex drawing. It can be started with a blank

page by drawing an idea that has to be developed, and from it, the sub-ideas can be derived from the main idea. The

mind map can help the organization with thinking, managing, planning, creativity, and innovation.

2. Set monthly benchmarks - in an organization introducing new software and losing the improvement track always

creates an issue for organizational growth. The solution to this problem is setting up a monthly benchmark and act

accordingly. Introducing monthly benchmarks to your knowledge management strategy helps to monitor

organizational activity in a specific interval.

Bringing monthly benchmarks to your knowledge management strategy can help monitor organizational activities in a

specific interval. With monthly benchmarks, you can easily access your productivity, set goals, and evaluate the

outcomes. This easily adaptable process is entirely flexible for prioritizing the goals and act accordingly. You can

keep consecutive goals that can be achieved one after another; hence those can be assigned to your team, respectively.

3. Simplify your training procedures - Hiring new employees and get them trained as per the organizational system

is time-consuming. Different managers and team leads have their own and different approaches to train their

newcomers to make them capable of regular activity. Here the knowledge management helps to minimize the timely

effort taken by the managers by simplifying the whole training process in one document.

A single document can be created, which has all possible information about the organization that has been collected

through years of experience. The same knowledgebase can be given to the new comes to go through and later to have

Q&A session with the manager to clear their doubts. In this way, the training time for the newcomers as well as per

the manager can be reduced and simplified.

4. Encourage community action - As we were aware, today's knowledge management system is a social network that

has all the information in it. But there is nothing more useful than our information or knowledge which we get from

our own experience through the years.

Instead of using the social network knowledge for knowledge management, communicating with our ideas and

information will be more fruitful.

5. Enable dynamic search function - When an organization deals with daily searching activity, dynamic function

helps in many ways. It can be saving time for employees as well as decreasing searching time effort. The search

function is significant in knowledge management strategies. Dynamically searching relevant information helps in the

time-saving of employees. Although it takes a lot of effort for an organization to perform this operation, it helps them

skip the unnecessary search and get the relevant search result at once.

6. Develop a framework for content creation - A proper framework allows employees of an organization to

maintain appropriate consistency in content creation. If you ask for an article to 5 different employees, you will end up

in receiving 5 items, but if there is a particular framework or format is specified from the beginning, then it will help

both the employees as well as the organization to follow the same standard for all the documents used.

This process helps in creating a knowledge management strategy by specifying a particular format for the documents

and files used in an organization.

7. Segment everything into spaces - Once a set of information or knowledge is appropriately segmented or arranged,

it becomes easy to access. When the organization grows, it becomes tough to find out the piece of information while

looking for it. The best solution is segmentation. When the information is segmented and arranged adequately, it is

easier to navigate through the knowledge base. Organizing documents makes it easier for the team as well as others to

understand the process smoothly.

Segmenting documents prevents information overloading as well as disruption of other information with the

organization's growth. Segmentation helps in reducing the time and effort to search for particular details.

8. Look beyond customer service - An organization always deals with end-users or customers and aims to have a

happy and satisfied customer at the end. Keeping your customers or clients happy is the primary goal of an

organization and always addressed on top priority and immediately.

Knowledge management is more than a means to improve customer service. It's also related to a different part of an

organization, such as HR, accounting, marketing, and sales. They are linked to various departments, but they use the

same knowledge base at the end.

Explicit and codified knowledge

There are two major types of knowledge are central to KM

• Tacit knowledge

• Explicit knowledge

The distinction between tacit and explicit knowledge is perhaps the most fundamental concept of knowledge

management. Such a distinction was first made by Michael Polyani in the 1960s, but it forms one of the central

planks of Nonaka and Takeuchi's book The Knowledge-Creating Company (1995)

[http://www.skyrme.com/kmbasics/ktacit.htm]

Tacit knowledge (knowing-how): knowledge embedded in the human mind through experience and jobs. Know-how

and learning embedded within the minds of people. Personal wisdom and experience, context-specific, more difficult

to extract and codify. Tacit knowledge Includes insights, intuitions.

Explicit knowledge (knowing-that): knowledge codified and digitized in books, documents, reports, memos, etc.

Documented information that can facilitate action. Knowledge what is easily identified, articulated, shared and

employed.

Thus, explicit (already codified) and tacit (embedded in the mind).

Explicit knowledge Tacit (implicit) knowledge

Objective, rational, technical Subjective, cognitive, experiential learning

Structured Personal

Fixed content Context sensitive/specific

Context independent Dynamically created

Externalized Internalized

Easily documented Difficult to capture and codify

Easy to codify Difficult to share

Easy to share Has high value

Easily transferred/ taught/learned Hard to document

Exists in high volumes Hard to transfer/teach/learn

Involves a lot of human interpretation

However, Dalkir (2005, p.8) notes that tacit knowledge is quite a relative concept: - what is easily articulated by one

person may be very difficult to externalize by another. Thus, the same content may be explicit for one person and tacit

for another.

The terms ‘tacit knowledge’ and ‘implicit knowledge’ are sometimes used as synonyms. “Implicit” means that

which is implied in a statement, but is not explicitly said. The term could refer to things that are contextual to a

statement - that is, further statements that are connected with it in socially understandable manners.