KM Definition

Knowledge management is a very broad topic and has many views.However statistics shows that 80 percent of KM projects are a failure
This is a interesting pdf about KM Glossary: Click to view

Knowledge is a very important part of every business organization.

To get a good basic understanding about knowledge and managing the knowledge one must read views expressed by Penrose (1959) and Drucker (1993). Penrose considered acquiring knowledge is a "Social Learning Process". Drucker coined the term "Knowledge worker" (Drucker 1959) Knowledge workers are generally people who are involved in planning, acquiring searching, analyizing, organinzing information in an organization.
In an IT field programmers, system analysts, technical writers, academic professionals, researchers are considered as knowledge workers.
Peter Drucker in The Effective Executive(1966) describes each "knowledge worker" as an executive of the organization either by his position or knowledge and that his contribution affects the capacity of the organization to perform and obtain results

The Most commonly accepted view of knowledge Management is the collection of simple facts which is "data" which when processed and structured forms "Information" and this when interpreted in a proper manner becomes "Knowledge", but now KM is also viewed in another dimension i.e reverse knowledge hierarchy (TUOMI, 1999) here the author says information cannot be interpreted without any prior knowledge and data cannot be collected without the knowledge of what information to be collected.

According to Karl Wiig of Knowledge Research Institute says that knowledge management[KM] is a very vast topic of discussion. KM is ability of an organization to make effective use of its human resources, "human capital" or "brainware" (LIEBOWITZ, 1999)

Where as Wilma Abney and Daimler Chrysler of corporate university think KM as "Know what is Known, who knows it, How it has been applied and how it can be further leveraged and shared " and these ideas are reflected in book Sharing Expertise(Ackerman., et al 2003)

"If only HP knew what it knows it would make three times more profit tomorrow"

By Lew Platt, ex CEO Hewlett Packard

The above is one of the definition of knowledge management but has made huge impact around the world. In simple words it describes the importance of knowledge sharing and knowledge management, if they had a proper way to handle and manage the knowledge acquired by the employees and the organization, then the knowledge would remain inside the organization.

As mentioned earlier that 80 percent of the KM projects are failure, the possible reason for this may be that the organizations fail in one of the stages of KM i.e either in knowledge conversion or knowledge dissemination or may their may not have a proper method to discard the obsolete knowledge or which would become a mere data..

But Wilson (2002) has different views about Knowledge Management, understanding learning and gaining knowledge is the process that goes on in the mind. And there is no way to store knowledge but it can be expressed in the form of symbols, figures, articles or 'body language' . And that each mind processes information in its own fashion and gains knowledge.

And to me KM is process of learning new things and have the ability to know when, where and in what situation it can/has to be applied, and finally discarding the old knowledge and make room for new knowledge. Managing the knowledge is some things everyone does right from the young age as mentioned by my friend salis in his blog (Read More..) and nobody teaches us how to manage the knowledge acquired, its the part of our beautiful mind. for example can you remember what is the name of the maths teacher who thought you in high school... well some will remember and most will not remember because the brain discarded that information or knowledge as it will consider it as irrelevant. But to your surprise you might still remember the name of the kindergarten you attended... amazing isn't it. And i think organizations should follow the same method used by the human brain, i know it is very difficult to match any existing machine to a human brain as it far more advanced.

References:

1. Penrose, E.(1959), The Theory of The Growth of The Firm, Oxford University Press, New York, NY, .

2. Drucker, P.(1959), Landmarks of Tomorrow

3. Drucker, P.(1993), Managing for Results,London.

4. Jay Liebowitz :knowledge Management Handbook, CRC Press, 1999 Website:Book Preview 22-01-2009

5. Iikka Tuomi : Data is more than knowledge, ISBN: 0-7695-0001-3,Website: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=772795 , 22-01-2009

The above paper also appears in : System Sciences, 1999. HICSS-32. Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Hawaii International Conference