Chapter Five
Knowledge Management Processes
and Systems
Learning objectives
• Familiarize to knowledge management
programs and systems
• Know the information system applications
useful for distributing, creating, and sharing
knowledge in the firm
• Introduce KM concepts
• Introduce organizational learning and org
memory
What is KM?
• Knowledge management (KM) is a process
that helps organizations identify, select,
organize, disseminate, and transfer important
information and expertise that are part of the
organization’s memory or knowledge assets and
to help the organization compete.
• Knowledge management, or KM, is the process
through which organizations generate value
from their intellectual property and knowledgebased assets.
• Knowledge management is purported
increase innovativeness and responsiveness.
to
3
KM?
• KM involves the creation, dissemination, and
utilization of knowledge.
• It is also viewed as the intersection between
People, Processes and Technology.
• Many organizations are now employing chief
knowledge officer (CKO) to be responsible for
the organization's knowledge management.
• The information technologies that together make
knowledge management available throughout an
organization are referred to as a knowledge
management system (KMS).
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Knowledge Management
Components
Knowledge
management
components, cycles and
technologies
Components:
Strategies
Processes
Metrics
Cycles:
Knowledge creation,
capturing, storing,
disseminating,
applying and
evaluating
Technologies:
Expert systems
Collaboration
Training
Web
5
Con’t…
• Implementing and maintaining a knowledge
management policy
– Providing an appropriate IT infrastructure to store
and
distribute
knowledge
around
the
organization.
– Employing staff to manage knowledge maintained
in the organization's database, and
– Ensuring that knowledge workers are trained and
have appropriate access to the organization's
knowledge base.
Knowledge
Four descriptions:
• Knowledge is information combined with experience,
interpretation and reflection of an individual
• Knowledge is a justified personal belief.
– Knowledge is relative to the knower
– More structured information in the human mind
• A capability to apply information
• Example
• The programmer salary is small, I will not be a
programmer
• Actionable information
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knowledge management projects have
one of three aims
• To make knowledge visible and show the role
of knowledge in an organization.
• To develop a knowledge-intensive culture by
encouraging and aggregating behaviors.
• To build a knowledge infrastructure-not only a
technical system, but a web of connections
Key terms
 Organizational learning: the ability of an organization to create new
standard operating procedures and business processes from its
experience that add value to products and services
 Organizational Memory: Stored learning from organization’s history .
 Knowledge management :Set of processes to create, gather, store,
maintain, and disseminate knowledge
 Knowledge Assets: Organizational knowledge enabling the business
to create value
 Chief Knowledge Officer (CKO): Senior executive in charge of
organization’s knowledge management program
Type of knowledge
• Structured internal knowledge
– research and development reports
• External knowledge
– being providing by competitors and any
intelligence
• Informal internal knowledge
– knowledge workers in the organization
Discussion
• List different types of knowledge
–Structured Internal
–External
–Informal Internal
Classification of Knowledge
• There are different classification of knowledge
• Example
– Know how and know what
– Tacit and explicit
– Tacit, implicit and explicit
– Etc
• Commonly knowledge is classified as Tacit
and Explicit knowledge
Tacit Knowledge
•
•
•
•
A knowledge that is embedded with the knower
Highly contextual knowledge
Unstructured as compared to explicit knowledge
Difficult to verbalize and codify on knowledge
repositories
• It contains the largest part of our knowledge
• As Polanyi Said “We know more than we can
say”
»Identify any tacit Knowledge in
your organization
Explicit knowledge
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Knowledge that can be verbalized and codified
Knowledge that we find in books, databases
Structured compared to tacit knowledge
Easy to store in databases and documents
It is easily accessible to everyone
Knowledge that is detached from the Knower
Some Researcher label it as Information
The Issue is not resolved among philosophers and scholars
The smaller part of our knowledge
»Identify any explicit Knowledge
in your organization
Tacit versus Explicit knowledge
Explicit
knowledge
Tacit Knowledge
Location of knowledge
• Knowledge is classified as individual, group
and organizational knowledge by possession
• Individual knowledge is knowledge created
and possessed by individuals
– It is the base for other categories of knowledge
– It is more of personal belief which may or may not
be accepted by the group and the organization
– More of tacit type knowledge
– Emanates from experience by doing tasks
Driving forces of KM
1. External forces
– Rapid Advances in technologies
– Globalization of business
• Increased opportunities and competition
– Sophistication of customers- increasing demands,
and changing preferences
– Sophisticated competitors
– Sophisticated suppliers
17
Con’t…
2. Internal forces
– Bottlenecks to enterprise effectiveness
– Increased technological capabilities
– Need to understand human cognitive functions
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Con’t…
3.Ongoing forces
• Economics of ideas—innovation
– The need to create new products and services to meet ever
changing customer needs (ex HP company)
• ICT and information management
– Generation of too much information with ICT
– Increased ICT capability to manage information
• Understandings in cognitive sciences
• Shifts in bottlenecks
– The need to quickly adapt to environmental changes
• Globalization
– A continuous process with change of technology
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• Why Adopting KM?
Top Reason’s for Adopting KM
1. Creating easy access and visibility to
organizational knowledge
2. retaining expertise of personnel,
3. increasing customer satisfaction,
4. improving profits or increasing revenues. KM
is clearly suited to capturing both internal
(employees’) and external (customers’)
knowledge.
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Knowledge Management Systems
• The use of cutting-edge information technologies (e.g.,
Web-based conferencing) to support KM mechanisms
enables dramatic improvement in KM.
• Knowledge
management
mechanisms
are
organizational or structural means used to promote
knowledge management.
• knowledge management systems (KMS): the synergy
between latest technologies and social/structural
mechanisms
• Internet and intranets web sites, groupware, data
mining, knowledge bases, discussion forums, and video
conferencing are some of the key IT infrastructures for
gathering, storing, and distributing this knowledge
Technology + Social Mechanisms = KMS
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Four different types of knowledge
support systems
1. Knowledge
Capture Systems
• Knowledge capture systems support process of eliciting
explicit or tacit knowledge from people, artifacts, or
organizational entities
• These systems can help capture knowledge existing either
within or outside organizational boundaries, among
employees, consultants, competitors, customers, suppliers,
and even prior employers of the organization’s new
employees
• Knowledge capture systems rely on mechanisms and
technologies that support externalization and internalization.
Knowledge capture mechanisms
1. The development of models or prototypes,
and the articulation of stories are some
examples of mechanisms that enable
externalization.
2.Learning by observation and face-to-face
meetings are some of the mechanisms that
facilitate internalization
Becerra-Fernandez, et al. -- Knowledge
Management 1/e -- © 2004 Prentice Hall
Using Stories for Capturing
Tacit Knowledge
Organizational stories:
– “a detailed narrative of past management actions,
employee interactions, or other intra- or extraorganizational events that are communicated
informally within organizations”
• include a plot (or plan), major characters, an outcome,
and an implied moral
• play a significant role in organizations characterized by a
strong need for collaboration
Organization stories ...
• Important to capture and transfer tacit
knowledge
• stories make information more vivid,
engaging, entertaining, and easily related to
personal experience and because of the rich
contextual details encoded in stories, they are
the ideal mechanism to capture tacit
knowledge
Con’t….
• Intelligent agents are software programs that
are given to undertake a specific task.
• Examples are
– Expert systems:- is effectively providing assistance
to knowledge workers by eliminating routine tasks
that knowledge worker has to undertake
– Decision support system
– Fault Diagnosis System
– HelpDesk Systems, etc
Discussion
• Capture tacit and explicit
knowledge on your
organization or environment
2. Knowledge
Sharing Systems
• Systems that enable members of an organization to
acquire tacit and explicit knowledge from each other.
• WWW is the main medium for knowledge sharing.
• Knowledge markets: attract a critical volume of
knowledge seekers and knowledge owners in order to
be effective as just other businesses do.
• Sharing knowledge within organization involves using
the existing network systems to provide access to
database and a communication system to send
knowledge to other workers within the organization.
Knowledge Sharing ...
• Knowledge owners
– want to share their knowledge with a controllable and trusted
group,
– decide when to share and the conditions for sharing, and
– seek a fair exchange, or reward, for sharing their knowledge.
• Knowledge seekers should also
– not be aware of all the possibilities for sharing, thus the
knowledge repository (sources) will typically help them through
searching and ranking, and
– want to decide on the conditions for knowledge acquisition
KS system ...
• Frequently mentioned system is document management
system.
• Has repository as its core module that affords multiple access
points.
• The document management system essentially stores
information.
• The repository can be centralized or it can be distributed.
• Builds upon the repository by adding support to the
classification and organization of information,
• Unifies storage and retrieval of documents over a platformindependent system.
Sharing of knowledge
• Two specific software systems normally
allow for the sharing of knowledge,
namely:
–Groupware and
–Intranets.
1. Groupware fundamentals
• Groupware products allow for the sharing of
information between different workers within
an organization.
– Group writing and commenting……LAN
– Electronic mail distribution
– Scheduling meetings……outlook
– Meetings and conferences
2. Intranets
• Any information that needs to be shared can be placed
onto the intranet-this information
• It can range from basic reports through to technical
documentation and procedures manuals.
• It is use by data and knowledge workers.
• do not require any special hardware to run, and so can
be established over an existing network relatively
quick.
• The only software required is a web browser, such as
Internet explorer and a computer to act as a wave
server.
• An extension of the intranet idea is an extranet.
Benefits of using an Intranet
• Low start-up costs
• Reduced distribution costs for information
• Low training costs-most employees will have
used a web browser
• Easily expandable, depending on the size of
the organization
• Information provision can use all of the
functionality available in HTML documents.
3. Knowledge Distribution
• Socialization and data mining
–To discover tacit knowledge:
Socialization
• Socialization enables the discovery of
tacit knowledge through joint activities
•between masters and apprentices
•between researchers at an academic
conference
Knowledge Discovery from Data –
Data Mining
• Another name for Knowledge Discovery in
Databases is data mining (DM).
• Data mining systems have made a significant
contribution in scientific fields for years.
• The recent proliferation of e-commerce
applications, providing reams of hard data
ready for analysis, presents us with an
excellent opportunity to make profitable use of
data mining.
Levels of distribution
• 1st- co-coordinating work within one
department or work group in the organization
• 2nd - distributing knowledge between the
different departments of an organization
• 3rd - providing connections to the external
environment such as customers, suppliers,
contract staff, bankers, etc
4. Creation of Knowledge
• Knowledge creation are facilities required to help
knowledge workers actually create knowledge.
– External knowledge:- Information concerning the
activities of competitor, requirements of the market
and deficiencies in existing products.
– A user-friendly interface allowing quick access to
appropriate information as well as software
applications.
– Appropriate computer hardware, with large memory
and sufficient processing power to run the more
advanced software applications.
Con’t…
• Requirements for create Knowledge
– Technical Support
– Working environment
– Flexible working hours
Discussion Questions
• How does organizational learning and KM
relates
• Explore KM practices in Ethiopian firms, Cite
if there is an Ethiopian organization, which is
exemplar in KM
• Compare and Contrast Information systems
and Knowledge management systems
Questions?