Mohammad Mosaddek Hussain :
Enterprises, business organizations, companies and commercial conglomerates are nowadays properly realizing how important the is to “know what they know” as well as how they be able to make maximum use for achieving their goal for which they become established . In the current century economy where the only certainty is uncertainty, one sure source of lasting competitive advantage is to achieve knowledge at all level in the organization.
Success in a rapidly growing competitive marketplace depends critically on the quality and effective management of knowledge which organizations apply to their key business processes for its increasing growth and stability in the future years. Now, I am eager to express how to manage knowledge effectively in the corporate and buness situation. It is important to analyze the need and importance of knowledge, an intellectual capital, in today’s information age. It starts with discussing the main component that is knowledge and its different types and continues with sections defining knowledge management, its objectives and activities to give a good insight of purpose, need and importance of knowledge management. Afterwards, this intellectual capital can be managed effectively through various techniques. For effective management of knowledge, a knowledge management infrastructure has to be proposed which is based on three components namely Culture, Strategy, and Technology and, it is manifested that how the business leaders and entrepreneurs can manage knowledge effectively through these components in the organizations through the management and employees.
Since the inception of the industrial age, organizations improved their efficiency, effectiveness and hence their competitive edge, by automating manual labor and reducing redundancy. Now in the age of Knowledge workers, many organizations have gone through massive restructuring and OD process to eliminate redundant workers and jobs. Sometimes these efforts lead to the ideas of business process engineering. Downsizing resulted in major loses, sometimes irreplaceable, of core knowledge assets as employees walked out the door with their knowledge. The effects of such knowledge dissipation are stunned innovation, teamwork and productivity as a whole.
During the 1990s, the nature of competition changed rapidly due to rampant increasing in global connectivity, distributed expertise and shorter product development cycles. Organizations are now, streamlining their processes and exploring ways of working smarter through improved collaboration and communication. During the current information age the whole world continues to shift towards a knowledge-based economy, knowledge management has emerged as a methodology for capturing and managing the intellectual assets of an organization as a key to sustaining competitive advantage among other competitors and associates of the business world.
Knowledge management is a new strategic initiative that is changing the paradigm of information systems from one of processing data and providing information to one of harvesting and capitalizing on the knowledge of an entire organization, ranging from expertise in individuals’ heads to documented material.
Through a congenial and supportive organizational climate, and today along with good knowledge management, an organization can bring its entire organizational memory and knowledge to bear on any problem anywhere in the world and at anytime. Knowledge about how problems are solved can be captured so that knowledge management can promote organizational learning, leading to further knowledge creation for better development in the oraganizational setting.. Today, organizations are making major long-term investments in knowledge management for their own interest and ensuing rapid growth and survival. Worldwide spending on knowledge management services is expected to grow from $1.8 billion to more than $8 billion by 2003 as expressed by Dyer, 2000 and KM news archive, 2000.
On the other hand knowledge management requires a major transformation in organizational culture to create a desire to share, the development of methods that ensure that knowledge bases are kept current and relevant, and a commitment at levels of a firm for it to succeed for survival in the coming days.
It is necessary to know that before discussing knowledge management, a brief description is important about the Knowledge, what does it meant for and its distinction with data and information in the context of information systems. Data are collection of facts, measurements and statistics whereas Information is defined as organized or processed data that are timely (i.e., inference from the data are drawn within the time frame of applicability) and accurate (i.e., with reference to original data).
Knowledge is information that is contextual, relevant and actionable. Therefore the implication is that knowledge has strong experiential and reflective elements that distinguish it from information in a given context.
Having knowledge implies that it can be exercised to solve a problem, whereas having information does not carry the same connotation. While data, information and knowledge can all be viewed as assets of an organization, knowledge provides higher level of meaning about data and information. It conveys meaning and hence tends to be much more valuable.
Also, while information as a resource is not always valuable, knowledge as a resource is valuable because it focuses attention back towards what is important. Knowledge is still valuable or reusable after lapse of time and has historical relevance, while the value of information tends to decline with time without preservation of the context in which it was acquired. Over time, information accumulates while knowledge evolves.
Many experts of Knowledge Management define Knowledge Management in various ways.
Holsapple and Whinston (1996) & Zack (1999) define six types of knowledge that knowledge management application can contain. These include:
Descriptive
Procedural
Reasoning
Linguistic
Presentation
Assimilative knowledge
Descriptive knowledge is information about the past, present, future, or hypothetical states of relevance concerned with knowing what. Procedural knowledge is concerned with knowing how and specifies step-by-step procedures for how tasks are accomplished. Reasoning knowledge is concerned with knowing why, evaluating conclusions that are valid for set of circumstances. Presentation knowledge facilitates communication and it is concerned with the method of delivery of knowledge. Linguistics knowledge interprets communication once it has been received.
Assimilative knowledge helps to maintain the knowledge base by improving on existing knowledge. The first three types are the basic knowledge that an organization has in terms of performing its business processes. The latter three provide communicating, understanding and learning of knowledge in order to use it.
Regarding the classification of knowledge, it has also been classified as advantaged knowledge, which can be described as the knowledge that can provide competitive advantage; base knowledge as knowledge that is integral to an organization, providing it with short-term advantages and trivial knowledge as knowledge that has no major impact on the organization as Clarke opined in1998.
Intellectual capital is another term for knowledge about which Ulrich (1998) defines intellectual capital as the competence of an individual and the commitment of the individual to contribute to the organization’s goals (as he expressed that Intellectual Commitment = Competence × Commitment). Besides this, other classification of knowledge is Tacit knowledge and Explicit knowledge.
Tacit knowledge is the cumulative store of experiences, insights, expertise, know-how, trade secrets, understanding and learning. It is also referred as embedded knowledge and is unstructured and intangible and thus hard to codify. On the other hand, explicit knowledge is the policies, procedural guides, reports, strategies etc of the organization or enterprise that has been codified and can be distributed to others without interpersonal interactions.
(Mohammad Mosaddek Hussain, email: [email protected])
