Knowledge Management

Data. At first we had too little. We asked for more and we got it. Now we have more than we want. Data lead to information, but what we were looking in the first place was knowledge [1].

It is common to think at the current post-industrial global economy as an information-intensive environment. More remarkable is the high number of assertions that knowledge is the key of effective competition, marketplace distinction and profitability [2]. Knowledge can be defined as the "awareness and understanding of facts, truths or information gained in the form of experience or learning. Knowledge is an appreciation of the possession of interconnected details which, in isolation, are of lesser value" [Wikipedia].

Knowledge is considered an enterprise asset [3] that, unlike material assets, which decrease as they are used, increase with use: ideas breed new ideas, and shared knowledge stays with the giver while it enriches the receiver. Knowledge has been broadly recognized as the key to effective competition [4].

According to Demarest [2], effective management of any organization´s marketplace performance is primarily based on:

a shared notion of how value is created, maintained and distributed within the organization and shared with upstream and downstream elements of the value chain within which the organization participates;
a set of processes and systems that support and help channel the organization´s value creating activities along the lines suggested by the shared models;
a set of key metrics that link the value-creation process within the organization to more-or-less objective measures of the organization´s success;
a set of command and control systems that monitor the efficiency and effectiveness of that value creation process.

The challenge, for an organization whose strategy requires effective participation in knowledge-intensive sectors of the global economy, consists in building an organization able to manage efficiently and effectively these four aspects where value is represented by knowledge.

What is knowledge?

It is not easy to define the term "knowledge" as it has different meanings depending on context.

In the context of the business enterprise or the personal computer user, knowledge tends to connote possession of experienced "know-how" as well as possession of factual information or where to get it.

In philosophy, the theory of knowledge is called epistemology and deals with such questions as how much knowledge comes from experience or from innate reasoning ability; whether knowledge needs to be believed or can simply be used; and how knowledge changes as new ideas about the same set of facts arise.

Data, Information and Knowledge »

References

[1] Amrit Tiwana
The Knowledge Management Toolkit
Prentice Hall, 2002

[2] Demarest Marc
Understanding Knowledge Management
Long Term Planning, Vol. 30, No. 3, pp. 347-384, 1997

[3] Brooking A.
Intellectual capital
UK: International Thomson Business Press, 1996

[4] Davenport T.H., Prusak L.
Working Knowledge: How Organizations Manage What They Know
Harvard Business School Press, Boston, 1997

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Knowledge Management

What is knowledge?

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