Knowledge Management

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Introduction Knowledge management forms one of the most important features of an Organisation s performance. Knowledge management can be expressed as a range of practices, processes to identify, create, distribute and share knowledge throughout the organization. 1 Many organisations are beginning to recognise and reinforce the significance of knowledge management by providing training which in turn, should be aligned with the Organisation s business needs. Motorola for instance, has formed a university in their workplace and are using their learning programmes to address their critical business issues and ultimately,aim to solve them;itperceives learning as a key integratedconstituent of their culture.2 The most distinct advantage identified renders in those businesses which have applied knowledge management to their organisation and gained the ability to make use of their intellectual assets more efficiently compared to competitors. The good news is that given reflection, focus and an appropriate and tailored combination of change and support elements, effective knowledge management can enable corporate renewal, learning and transformation to occur. Substantially more value can be created for various stakeholders. 3

Knowledge Management and creating competitive advantages Nonaka,4argues that competitive advantages is established in Organisations ability to generate new form of knowledge and translate this into innovative actions. He further states that one sure source of lasting competitive advantage is knowledge and describes the different kinds of knowledge that exist in organisations and the ways in which this knowledge can be translated into actions. Knowledge should be easily communicated, quantified and systematic so that it could be applied to an IT system or a new product. Tacit knowledge on the other hand is more inarticulate; an understood but rarely described type of knowledge within an organisation. Although more problematic,since it is not straightforwardly disseminated, tacit knowledge is arguably as significant as explicit knowledge. Those companies able to use both types of knowledge ought to make creative breakthrough and ultimately, create competitive advantage which sets them apart from their competitors. Knowledge creating companies systematically ensure that both tacit and explicit knowledge feed into each other into a spiral of knowledge within the organisation. It is conceivably no surprise that knowledge management has been deliberated, in today s complex and ever changing environment, as being hype of literature management and some even advocated it as the Holy Grail for creating Organisational competitive advantage. Jeffery Tan5 suggested that a successful company is a knowledge-creating company: one which is able to consistently

produce new knowledge, to disseminate it throughout the company and then apply it into new product or services produced in the organisation. Knowledge Management and a learning organisation Knowledge management can also be associated with the ability of the company to adapt to changes or to a learning organisation. Traditional view of managerial success places the importance of planning, organising, directing and controlling operations. However, with globalisation, the need for the organisation to respond rapidly to constant environmental changes has drawn the importance of a learning organisation. One of the key factors in organisational effectiveness is the successful management of change and innovation; and also,corporate governance s ability to renew their ideas. The chiefelement that affects a learning organisation is concerned with the ability of the organisation to change rapidly within their environment. Argyris6explains in essence the aim is to create a culture for the continuous learning for all employees . Thus, in order to create a learning organisation, all employees within the organisation play a vital part in adopting and applying it in their daily routine. Organisations need to constantly expand their capacity to generate results wherenew and vast patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is valued and where employees are continuously learning how to learn together. Therefore, organisationsought to develop a learning culture and instil employees commitment and ability to learn at all levels of the organisation. Senge7, inhis paper advocated 5 basic features for a learning organisation: y System thinking: the recognition that everything in the organisation are interconnected and that the organisation constitutes a complex system; meaning that any changes made in one part of the organisation would affect another part of the organisation. Personality mastery: the competencies and skills associated with the management of employees within the organisation. Mental models: the driving and fundamental values which are shared within the organisation. Shared vision: it is important that all employees at all levels in the organisation share the same goal and vision. Team learning: two mutually complementary practices of dialogue and discussion within the organisation in order to achieve a common goal.

y y y y

Leadership plays an important role in developing and refining methods for understanding how things work, how to adapt to environmental changes and achieve the goals set at corporate level. Leadersought to empower employees at all levels to deal with problems and find the best solution that would work. Knowledge should be of central importance throughout the organisation and individuals are encouraged to apply new knowledge to their work. Management

would also use invested resources to promote learning and innovation throughout the organisation. The learning organisation is essential in liberating and energising and is thus, crucial for the organisation s survival and growth8. This need for constant change and improvement will translate into a key capability; continuous organisational learning. It is important for every organisation to excel and lessons learned usually come from making mistakes, learning from industry leaders and competitors, customers, suppliers, and other sectors. This allows the organisation to compare their capability to others within the same industry and how their organisation matches. How technology helps to enhance knowledge mana gement. With the rapid changes in information technology, IT has become a key enabler to facilitating knowledge management practices using tools such as expert system, knowledge base helpdesk, as well as content management system such as Wikis, blogs and other technological tools. Knowledge management is today more collaborative through the availability of IT applications and the internet as tools which eventually enables knowledge to be shared throughout the organisation. McElroy9 suggested that knowledge management at this time needs a second generation which would be more focused on knowledge creation. He pointed out that knowledge sharing alone does not lead to innovative thinking; instead another approach to knowledge management is needed where people are able to share, analyse and revise ideas. The application of IT, collaborative tools such as messaging, forums and discussion boards will enable this new generation of knowledge management to be employed in the organisation. Furthermore, allowing devices to come together and communicate among themselves via Bluetooth or GPRS can enhance learning. The power of connectivity allows people to create and explore a new environment that can improve the ability to innovate and promote creativity in the organisation. As enabling technologies are becoming ever more sophisticated, our dependency on technology increases and our expectation will rise. This will also denotes the augmenting of the learning environment within the organisation. E-learning (electronic learning) is one of the examples of usage of information and communication technology applied to a learning organisation. It aids in facilitating this concept as it supports the use of information and communication technology intended for learning purposes throughout the organisation. It can cover a spectrum of activities from the use of technology to support learning as part of a blended approach (a combination of traditional and e-learning approach), to learning that is delivered entirely online. 10 E-learning can be used in a variety of ways with varying amounts of personal interaction. For example, within some university courses the majority of learningcan be done online with minimal attendance in university campuses or face- to- face tuition. Web technology has also changed the way in which people are communicating and their expectations on the scope and type of knowledge or information.

Information is no longer filtered from top down; it branches out into every imaginable direction and it flows away from the information creators towards the information users. 11 Employees now can access information that was once available to merely few key people. Networked companies are able to form linkages with partners and to have transparency throughout their processes, which would not have been conceivable decades ago. A change in the way knowledge is shared often comes hand in hand with other changes in the organisation. A knowledge infrastructure can be developed to enable project information and learning to be captured; the key importance to its success and other knowledge management project is the willingness of eachemployee to participate and share their experiences with others.

The importance of knowledge management to organisation Creative approach to knowledge management can result in improvement in efficiency, higher productivity and increase in revenues within practically any business function.12 Effective use of knowledge management ought to dramatically reduce the cost of Organisational operations. With the pressure for organisation to innovate, they often do not realise that what they are trying to do has perhaps already be done elsewhere in the world; this term is termed continually reinventing the wheel . Continually reinventing the wheel is costly and proved to be inefficient for organisation s pursuing any innovation; a more effective use of knowledge management would benefitin substantially reducing the cost of innovations and productions. Effective use of knowledge management accelerates knowledge creation, which in turn, representsa driver to innovation. Pan and Scarbrough13 found that within the context of organizational culture, trust must be one of the company s core values. Trust is reflected in employees willingness to exchange knowledge towards solving company problems. Barker and Camarata14, also assert that the preconditions necessary for a learning organization that shares knowledge includes the elements of trust, commitment, and perceived organizational support. They found that using positive reinforcement techniques rather than punishment proved to be an effective technique in a change effort to a knowledge-sharing learning organization. When employees felt trusted, empowered, and free from the fear of negative consequences associated with sharing their knowledge and decision-making, the attitudes and cultures within those organizations slowly changed to enable open discourse. The primary objective of an organization is to provide product or services to their customers based on their knowledge, experience and solutions initiated to customers problems. The related knowledge and experience can be accumulated through the exchange of information between the organization and customers; this is a critical factor to success for most knowledge-intensive organizations. Jeremy and Hope 15 predicted that a knowledge based economy would replace the industrial economy in the future. Founder of Microsoft, Bill Gates, also suggested that the success of an organization is dependant on the digital nerve

system of the organization which constitutes the combination of knowledge management, business operation and e-commerce.16 To do this, organizations need to control the flow of organizational knowledge by using IT applications so that they would be able to get accurate knowledge and generate fast response in shorter time. This is why Microsoft hasbeen actively involved in the research and development of the field of knowledge management in the early 1990 s. One of the key factors to success of knowledge management is for an organization to know how to share knowledge and learn from the experience of others. Various reasons and interest have drawn organizations to knowledge management; diversity is broad. Kerr17 explained that it is necessary to complement social with technological solutions in managing knowledge management. Organizations not only need to know-why (design rationale and reasoning) but also need to know-who ( mapping the expertise and skills) and know-how (promoting the communities of practice) to learn in a dynamic context.

The limitation and issue of knowledge manage ment Many of the current literature encourages organizations to become a learning organization and ripe the benefits in viewing knowledge as an assets, whilst not having difficulties in applying it. The fact is, the truism of knowledge is power means that employees within an organization whom which to retain their power and control may feel disconcerted to share their knowledge and experience through out the organization. Harrison 18skeptical about the ease of knowledge management can be managing view that knowledge develops in different ways in individuals and organization according to the process and variables that are only imperfectly understood. No consensus has been reached on how knowledge does in fact form, grow and change; or on the exact nature of the process linking data, information and knowledge. Knowledge is increasingly recognized as providing a foundation for creating corecompetencies and competitive advantages for organizations, thus effective knowledgemanagement (KM) has become crucial and significant. Despite evolving perspectivesand rigorous endeavors to embrace knowledge management intentions in business agendas, it is found thatorganizations cannot capitalize on the expected benefits and leverage theirperformances. An organization in Hong Kong,HS,which primarily export handbags and leather premium product to United States and European markets was facing a decline in revenue in the early 1998 due to fierce competition in the market and new design products by it competitors. The organization opted to adopt knowledge management systems, which would allow knowledge diffusion from highly experienced employees to new staff members.Instead of a top-down approach of policy making, the management adopted a middle-up-down approach. A detailed implementation plan was devised and the program was launched in April 2002.After 15 months, HS found that the KM initiative did not generate the positiveimpact on organizational performance as expected. Organizational performance remainedstagnant, revenue continued to decrease, and staff turnover rate stayed high. First, two crucial reasons were identified as to why HS

was unable to bridge the knowledge gap. They were (the top management)too ambitious or unrealistic to grasp and incorporate the best knowledge in industry into the company and had an insufficient role in encouraging the desired behavior. Similar to many other knowledge management misconceptions, top management wrongly aimed at incorporating other enterprises best practices (e.g., product design of the fad) or success stories (e.g., cost cutting and streamlining, operational processes) into its repositories without considering the relevance, suitability, and congruence to its capabilities. Therefore, this chasing-for-the-best strategy soon became problematic and drifted away from its knowledge management goals. Challenges to knowledge management system in ensuring that the processes are aligned with external knowledge creation models. Enablers to the knowledge management system may, in long term, become the constraint in adapting and evolving systems for the new business environment. Different organization sectors have their own particular knowledge problems to deal with and harvest. Conclusion

The structure of knowledge management system and its implementation benefits proposed in this paper are surely helpful for every organization. Some points are reminded in the following: 1. The forming and establishing of any knowledge management project is much dependent on top management support. 2. The organization status and staff's physiological conditions must be considered in the implementation of knowledge management. Other management technologies like ERP and SCM are more concentrated in matching up with the flow within the organization and with less considering the physiological factor. 3. To develop a learning-type organization, the organization is highly dependent on members to exchange his/her knowledge and experience with others. As a consequence, knowledge management implementation leads to increase competitiveness.

References 1. Van der Linde, K. Horney and Koonce , R. Seven ways to make your training department one of the best training and development, vol. 51, no. 8, August 1997. 2. Pickard J. Learning that is far from academic . People management, 9 March 1995. 3.Coulson- Thomas C. Knowledge is power Charted Secretary, January 1998. 4.Nonaka I, Knowledge Creating Company : How organization learn , International Thompson Business Press. 1996. 5. Tan J, Knowledge Management just more buzzard , British Journal of Administrative Management, March- April 2000. 6. Chris Argyris Management Today, October 1997. 7. Senge P, The fifth discipline: the art of the learning organization , Doubleday, 1990. 8.Yukl G, Leadership in organization , sixth edition, Pearson Prentice Hall, 2006. 9. Mc Elroy M, the new knowledge Management : Complexity, learning and sustainable innovations , Butterworth Heinemann, 2002. 10. Emerging Technologies for learning. A becta review of how technology is changing learning . May 2006. 11. Peters T. Re-Imagine , Dorling Kindersley, 2003. 12. www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/themes/elearning (accessed May 2011). 13. Pan, S.L. and Scarbrough, H. (1999), Knowledge management in practice: an exploratory case study ,Technology Analysis & Strategic Management, Vol. 11 No. 3, pp. 359-74. 14. Barker, R.T. and Camarata, M.R. (1998), The role of communication in creating and maintaining alearning organization: preconditions, indicators, and disciplines , Journal of Business Communication,Vol. 35 No. 4, pp. 443 -67. 15. Jeremy and Tony Hope (1997), Competing In The Third Wave, .

16. Ler, W.L. (1999), ³Business@ The Sp eed of Though: Using a DigitalNervous System,´ Business Journal, ROC. 17. Kerr. M ³Knowledge Management ; the occupational psychologist, no 48, May 2003.

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