Anecdote - Knowledge Management in Malaysia By Augustine Leonard Jen. 1.

Most real Knowledge Management (KM) professional/ practitioner in Malaysia found it is difficult to place them in the market. Or a place to start. 2. A real KM professional/ practitioner believe in this - Knowledge System/Spectrum started with Symbol (Universe of Events), awareness of data, information, understanding, knowledge, wisdom, and enlightenment. A flow diagram of the Data, Information, Knowledge & Wisdom (DIKW) hierarchy.

(Sources - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:DIKW.png) 3. KM is the acquisition, creation, generation, capture, documentation, retrieval, sharing and utilization of knowledge in an organization. 4. KM in Malaysia still in early stage of development and adaptation and no available frameworks on it are available. In addition, there is no professional body or society available to guide the KM professional/ practitioner as well to protect them, like Bar Council for Legal Practitioners, Malaysian Chartered Secretaries & Administrators (MAICSA) and many more. 5. KM offered as a post-graduate degree in our local universities. For instance Universiti Teknologi MARA (UiTM) and Multimedia University (MMU). In MMU, Knowledge Management (with Multimedia) offered as a first degree in the Faculty of Business and Law, Melaka Campus. 6. KM required top-down managerial support to succeed. And must be embedded as part of organization vision, mission and objectives. 7. In addition, KM has been perceived wrongly in the industries. Most common the association of IT in KM, make it, KM is part of IT, although it is not. IT is a tool or enabler for KM. Period.

* The views expressed here are the personal opinion of the writer.

8. By referring to the Data, Information, Knowledge & Wisdom (DIKW) hierarchy, there is no IT or Computer Science in sight. 9. Thus, when a job posting regarding KM related publish in the media, one of the requirement is to have knowledge in computer programming language or else must come the IT or Computer Science background. KM does not need this IT or Computer Science in order to be implemented. 10. IT comes because KM deals with a huge amount of data, that it is impossible to process manually. This is why IT is a KM enabler that helps to speed up the process. Similar with the requirement to be a KM professional/ practitioner in a Legal firm. You must have an LLB. It might sound harsh, but it is an insult for both professions, i.e. Lawyers & KM professionals. Furthermore, it is difficult to find lawyers with KM experience or certification and vice versa. It is better, in terms of career advancement for lawyers to pursue their LLM rather than doing Master of Knowledge Management area. 11. Most so call KM professional/ practitioner in Malaysia are talking about this and that, pertaining to issue in KM. Are they for real? Most of them do not know what is KM is all about. Just ask them about Knowledge Management System/Spectrum and they might not be able to answer. 12. Tying up KM and IT for KM implementation in the first stage actually screw up the whole process. There is always part in KM implementation that IT could be one of its enabler/tool. But dont put IT first, KM second in order to implement it. 13. KM implementation needs a huge budget. Most of the budget is use to build up a KM system, sometime from scratch. But when the implementation fails, it is not the KM process itself. The KM system builds by the IT/CS people that screw it up, and due to the fact that they do not understand what is KM at the first place. Not blaming those IT/CS people as a whole, but it is a mistake, by the KM champion or leader to put IT/CS as primary requirement for KM initiatives. 14. System requirement equal user requirement. This is the basic of building an information system. 15. Failure here makes top management to scrap off the KM initiative. They lose interest. Most of the reason for an in-house KM unit/department to be shut down. Thus knowledge resides in the organization come and goes without any documentation. It gives KM a bad name. 16. As a result, tacit knowledge in an organization come and goes without any proper documentation. As for explicit knowledge, it stays stagnant, without any improvisation and added value into it. 17. Real KM professional/ practitioner leave with no choice. To pursue other things and gradually their passion towards KM disappear. 18. An initiative to revive KM, especially in Malaysia to the stage where it supposed to be is urgently needed here. It can be done by combining 2 powerful disciplines, KM and Six Sigma. 19. Six Sigma support KM initiatives by providing a measurement to gauge the successfulness. Measurement in KM is considered rare until today. This sub-area of KM is untouched and unexplored. 20. A bright future of KM in Malaysia can be seen here onwards.

* The views expressed here are the personal opinion of the writer.