Unlock document.
This document is partially blurred.
Unlock all pages and 1 million more documents.
Get Access
Knowledge Management
Knowledge management is the set of practices aimed at discovering and harnessing an
organization intellectual resources. It about finding, unlocking, sharing, and altogether
capitalizing on the most precious resources of an organization: people expertise, skills,
wisdom, and relationships. Knowledge managers find these human assets, help people
collaborate and learn, help people generate new ideas, and harness those ideas into
successful innovations (Bateman, 2004, p.8-9). One of the most important factors of
change in management is the growing need for good, new ideas. Knowledge management
is an approach that allows people to produce change. It bringing people together and
collecting ideas from the group that can provide further success for the company and
personally for the employees. A new idea can produce growth and motivation within a
company. If the employees and the company as a whole come together and grasp a new
idea, it ultimately can lead to new inventions of products and services. (Lineman, 2004.)
Knowledge management is the process by which an organization creates, captures,
acquires and uses knowledge to support and improve the performance of the organization.
Two types of knowledge management are usually defined. The first is identifying
knowledge. This means the documents and catalogues knowledge held by individuals and
other forms of intellectual capital within the organization. Knowledge documentation
generally includes a directory of experts or specialists, a database of best practices, foreign
language capabilities, or unique talents or skills. In many organizations these are computer
accessible databases of individuals and their competencies in the form of documents:
memos, team progress reports, journal articles, resumes, working papers and research
reports. The second type of knowledge management functions to facilitate the sharing of
knowledge throughout the organization. This is usually accomplished via email on the
Internet or intranet, and through groupware, and other interactive software, but also
through face-to-face exchange. Therefore, knowledge management is an active or
proactive process by which an organization can increase its intellectual capital. This leads
to the creation of new positions titled chief learning officer. This knowledge, the sum of
what is known in the organization, is managed like other resources. For others, there is a
greater appreciation of what knowledge and skills are, how they are gained, and how
behavior is changed. For others, the intellectual capital and knowledge management efforts
are seen as new and necessary knowledge, skills and abilities. (Kinney, 1999)
Knowledge management is nothing new. For hundreds of years, owners of family
