Defining Knowledge Management

KM is difficult to articulate and quantify. It contains elements of many disciplines of "hard" and "soft" sciences. KM practices can be found in a number of places in Corporate America: in MIS departments, corporate libraries, strategic marketing, human resources, sales and customer services and in many other areas. In a growing number of forward looking companies, newly formed Knowledge Management departments can already be found.

Before we can talk about KM we need define what knowledge is.

Knowledge is "information resident in people’s minds, which is used for making decisions in unknown contexts". While knowledge must be in the mind of a knowledge worker (or automated process) to be productive, dormant or transient knowledge can be stored (i.e. in paper or electronic format) for subsequent retrieval and application by the knowledge worker.

The point is, in order to have value, knowledge must be applied to a new situation on which a decision or action can be made.

It is important to notice the distinction between knowledge and information. These two are distinct entities. While 'information' stored in a computer system is not a very rich carrier of human interpretation for potential action, ‘knowledge’ resides in the user’s subjective context of action based on that information.

With a notion of what knowledge is, we can begin our discussion of Knowledge Management.

Experts have defined KM as the storing, sharing and utilization of knowledge information in an organization for specific business advantages. There is no consensus on what KM is. Different articles give different definitions of KM. Following is a number of definitions:

"KM is an integrated systematic approach to identifying, managing and sharing all of an enterprise’s information assets, including databases, documents, policies and procedures, as well as previously unarticulated expertise and experience resident in individual workers" [R1].

"KM aims to achieve fast and easy access to all types of information and emphasizes interpersonal communication rather than the mere capture and storage of knowledge" [R1].

"KM caters to the critical issues of organizational adoption, survival and competence in face of increasingly discontinuous environmental change. Essentially, it embodies organization processes that seek synergies in the combination of data and information processing capacity of information technologies, with the creative and innovative capacity of human beings" [R2]

For the purpose of this paper we chose to adapt, with small alterations, the definition adopted by Delphi [R3]:

"KM is a tool set for the automation of deductive or inherent relationships between information objects, corporate users and business processes"

 

This definition clearly establishes the three different entities, which, through their interaction, aim to create new, knowledge-based, added value. None of these components is "new" in the corporate world. The innovation lies in the cost effectiveness and widespread capability of interaction between these three elements anywhere, anytime coupled with the increasing market offer of powerful "tools sets" capable of relating and operating them.