Knowledge Management

Knowledge classification and storing

BY:Aarti Singh Jasleen Sardar

Meaning
Simply put, knowledge management is about capturing knowledge gained by individuals and spreading it to others in the organization in order to manage it better. Knowledge management (KM) comprises a range of strategies and practices used in an organisation to identify, create, represent, distribute, and enable adoption of insights and experiences. Such insights and experiences comprise knowledge, either embodied in individuals or embedded in organisations as processes or practices.

Knowledge
Intelligence Knowledge
Human, judgemental Contextual, tacit Transfer needs learning

Information Data

Codifiable, explicit Easily transferable

The Knowledge Spiral as described by Nonaka & Takeuchi.

The role of HRM in the KM

As the discipline, knowledge management promotes an integrated approach to identifying, capturing, retrieving, sharing, and evaluating an enterprises information assets. These information assets may include databases, documents, policies, and procedures as well as tacit expertise and experience resident in individual workers. The resource based view of the firm suggests that organisations will need to be able combine distinctive, sustainable and superior assets, including sources of knowledge and information, with complementary competencies in leaders ship and human resource management and development to fully realize the value of their knowledge.

Issues

Issues for HRM include how organizations should be structured to promote knowledge creation and mobilization, and how to develop a culture and set of HRM policies and practices that harness knowledge and leverage it to meet strategic objectives.

There are several roles that can be played by HR in developing knowledge management system.

KM has the capacity to significantly broaden

HRM helps the organization to articulate the purpose of the knowledge management system. Too often, organizations embrace technologies to solve problems before they've even identified the problems they are trying to solve. Effectively framing the knowledge management issue, before deciding on a course of action, is a crucial prerequisite for success.

Implications of KM for HR Development.

As KM involves recognizing, documenting and distributing knowledge to improve organizational performance, it is of particular significance to HRD in training needs analysis and the planning of training to improve performance and deliver strategic results. KM challenges HR over intellectual property, professional identity and unit boundaries; KM perspectives move HRDs goal away from developing individual capacity to creating, nurturing and renewing organizational resources and interactions. Instead of devising training courses, HRD practitioners may need to identify organized elements that learners can reference as needed, depending on the particular challenges faced.

Classification of KM tools according to problem solving

Gray's classification recognizes different types of managing knowledge with regards action motivations in two different types of problems. The motivation can either be problem identification or problem solving, and the problem can be either unique/new or previously solved. four types of KM: (1) Discovering new issues, (2) Creating knowledge, (3) Acquiring knowledge, and (4) Raising awareness.

Shifting between these ascending can be seen as (a) identifying, (b) preserving/storing, and

Classification

Explicit Knowledge

This type of knowledge is formalized and codified, and is sometimes referred to as know-what . It is therefore fairly easy to identify, store, and retrieve This is the type of knowledge most easily handled by KMS, which are very effective at facilitating the storage, retrieval, and modification of documents and texts. Many theoreticians regard explicit knowledge as being less important It is considered simpler in nature and cannot contain the rich experience based know-how that can generate lasting competitive advantage.

Explicit knowledge is found in: databases, memos, notes, documents, etc.

Tacit Knowledge

This type of knowledge was originally defined by Polanyi in 1966. It is sometimes referred to as know-how and refers to intuitive, hard to define knowledge that is largely experience based. Because of this, tacit knowledge is often context dependent and personal in nature. It is hard to communicate and deeply rooted in action, commitment, and involvement. Tacit knowledge is also regarded as being the most valuable source of knowledge, and the most likely to lead to breakthroughs in the organization Gamble & Blackwell (2001) link the lack of focus on tacit knowledge directly to the reduced capability for innovation and sustained competitiveness. Tacit knowledge is found in: the minds of human stakeholders. It includes cultural beliefs, values,

Embedded Knowledge

Embedded knowledge refers to the knowledge that is locked in processes, products, culture, routines, artefacts, or structures (Horvath 2000, Gamble & Blackwell 2001). Knowledge is embedded either formally, such as through a management initiative to formalize a certain beneficial routine, or informally as the organization uses and applies the other two knowledge types. The challenges in managing embedded knowledge vary considerably and will often differ from embodied tacit knowledge. Culture and routines can be both difficult to understand and hard to change. Formalized routines on the other hand may be easier to implement and management can actively try to embed the fruits of lessons learned directly into

Knowledge Storage
Knowledge repository tools form the basis for storing and retrieving vast quantities of business intelligence or previous information, which can subsequently be used to form the basis for future predictions. These technologies and tools contribute to the effective codification, storage and archiving of knowledge while also focusing attention on another important aspect in the Knowledge management process such as the quality, quantity, accessibility and representation of the knowledge being stored.

Data warehouses are the main component of KM infrastructure. Organizations store data in a number of databases. The data warehousing process extracts data captured by multiple business applications and organizes it in a way that provides meaningful knowledge to the business, which can be accessed for future reference. Knowledge warehouses store the knowledge generated from a wide range of databases including: data warehouses, work processes, news articles, external databases, web pages and people (documents, etc.). Data marts represent specific database systems on a much smaller scale representing a structured, searchable database system, which is organized according to the users needs. Data repository is a database used primarily as an information storage facility, with minimal analysis or querying functionality. Content and Document Management Systems represent the convergence of full-text retrieval, document management, and publishing applications. Content management tools enable users to organize information at an object level rather than in large binary objects or full documents.

Knowledge Organization Technologies

Knowledge organization technologies allow better access to knowledge resources within the organization and facilitate knowledge retrieval. Topic maps are an advanced solution to the problem of structuring, storing and representing knowledge within a corporation. Skill maps are an extension of topic maps, creating new structures for storing information about employees, their knowledge and their skills. Controlled vocabularies enable the creation of information, its archiving for future uses and communication to others and to computer systems.