What Is Knowledge Management And Why Is It Important?
Knowledge management is critical to many organizations, and has been the preferred method of creating, representing, and distributing knowledge for reuse, awareness and learning for hundreds of businesses world wide since at least 1995 or earlier. In actual fact, this particular expertise - knowledge management - is a recognized discipline in professional and academic journals. You will also find many Universities offer courses in knowledge management.
Before knowledge management was knowledge transfer (more on this later) which included things like peer discussions on the job, professional training and mentoring programs or formal apprenticeship.
Where do you find this field of expertise in actual practice? Most often it is found in larger companies as an integral part of their Information Technology (IT) for Human Resources (HR) Departments. Knowledge management in any business is critical as you can tell by looking at the dollar figure attached to this market - a hefty multi-billion dollars worldwide. Not only is it essential, knowledge management must be effective. Why effective? If it isn't, the company doesn't make money. It's as simple as that.
Most often knowledge management programs are tied into what the company wants to achieve as its objectives, which makes sense. To that end the outcomes sought are usually in the realm of shared knowledge, improved execution, competitive advantage or a better record of introducing new things. Again, a company cannot reach its goals if it does not effectively manage and utilize what information it collects. So it can be said logically that knowledge management strives to bring under one umbrella a variety of thoughts and practices related to things such as intellectual capital, knowledge economy (and the knowledge worker), and the learning organization as an entity. Along with that comes the process of enabling practices within the organization, like Communities of Practice and enabling technologies, like knowledge bases and expert systems. To get a better grasp of what knowledge management is, think of it this way - it has a larger focus on specific knowledge and its development, and this would also include not just the knowledge itself, but ways (channels) it percolates through the organization. This should not be a surprise definition, because knowledge management obviously involves data mining and of necessity, some method to also deliver this information to users. Although it may sound complicated, if it is broken down into smaller chunks, it becomes quite clear. Based on what you have read so far, it makes sense that most major companies, and even smaller ones have a comprehensive knowledge management practice in place. By the way, this process can actually be applied to your own personal career goals.
Knowledge Management
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