Knowledge Management Coursework Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3000 words

Knowledge Management - Coursework Example Knowledge management is highly reliant on people. The staff, the employees all carry knowledge about the company and they are the ones that carry out knowledge management. At the end of the day information technology does play a great part but the human factor is way bigger and way more necessary. Information technology will help in developing a knowledge management system and the success will depend on how well the information is organized and stored. The information however comes from the human beings. It is important for them to be encouraged by the organization. There should be a very caring, social and interactive organizational culture for knowledge management to thrive. Often companies used to restrict access to information; often employees would not bother sharing information with others with regards to their own personal promotion or job safety. But now organizations have modernized, they take concrete steps to make sure that the culture is more open, more relaxed and everyo ne is more at ease. Knowledge sharing only takes place when the culture is open to it, people are at enough ease to open their minds up and share their knowledge with superiors and inferiors both. Knowledge rather than capital or labour is the only meaningful resource a company has according to Drucker(1993). Capital and labour are actually pretty volatile resources when you think about it. They provide you with stability but there is no guarantee that they won’t leave you. Capital can be lost when faced with a crisis, employees leave and all of them don’t stay for a long time but knowledge is one factor that is constant. It can be stored in repositories for ages; it can be further analyzed and disseminated. Every human process result is a key success factor which should be stored. All the developed economies are now moving from industrial to knowledge based economy as they realize the importance. Defined broadly â€Å"KM is the process through which organizations ext ract value from their intellectual assets† (Kaplan, 2002). Intellectual assets in this case are their employees and managers not the information technology systems that a company has. Employees spend a lot of time in a company; they learn the inputs, processes, outputs. The experience they gain is extremely valuable though intangible. This true information has to be stored somewhere; an employee can leave anytime and can take the expertise to another organization. Knowledge management is made in two dimensions. One is to manage the existing knowledge by creating repositories, knowledge compilation, arrangement and categorization. The second is the activities of knowledge acquisition, creation, distribution and application. (Stenmark, 2001) Knowledge management also consists of administering the knowledge assets of the organization which is the human resource. Knowledge modelling is a process that helps in achieving those goals. Knowledge management includes identifying and map ping knowledge within the organization. The end objective is to generate enough amount of knowledge that the business can gain competitive advantage. Knowledge management also observes the whole lifecycle of an organization, from the beginning to the possible end. It sees how the organization has changed over time, how it has adapted to the external environmental challenges and how it became successful (Mathi, 2004).