Week 5 Project

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Managing Knowledge in Digital Firms—Part 1

Let us discuss how to manage knowledge in digital �rms.

Organizations can use a knowledge management IS to leverage organizational knowledge by making it easily available to users. Knowledge management is a set of business processes designed to create, store, transfer, and utilize knowledge in the organization. Communicating and collaborating with experts and practitioners, creating new knowledge, organizing and storing information, and using corporate knowledge to improve business processes have become vital for corporate survival. Organizations require knowledge management systems because knowledge has become a source of competitive advantage and a strategic and central productive asset in today’s knowledge-driven economy.

Some aspects of organizational knowledge are unstructured, tacit, and not easily codi�ed or captured. Tacit knowledge is the undocumented knowledge residing in the minds of employees. On the other hand, documented knowledge is called explicit knowledge. Knowledge management captures and promotes organizational learning by increasing the ability of an organization to incorporate knowledge into its business processes and learn from its environment.

The three principal approaches to knowledge management systems are:

Intelligent techniques

Knowledge work systems

Enterprise-wide knowledge management systems

Let us discuss some of these approaches.

Arti�cial Intelligence (AI): Captures, codi�es, and extends corporate knowledge even though it lacks the generality, breadth, and �exibility of human intelligence. Firms use AI to help �lter and search information, discover knowledge, capture and preserve tacit knowledge, and generate solutions to problems that are too complex and massive for human beings to analyze.

Fuzzy logic: Expresses knowledge in the form of rules that use subjective or approximate values. Fuzzy logic is a software technology used for limited decision- making applications. But it has been traditionally used to control physical devices.