Knowledge Management

Knowledge Management is the hottest subject of the day. The question is: what is this activity called knowledge management, and why is it so important to each and every one of us? The following writings offer some emerging perspectives in response to these questions. As you read on, you can determine whether it all makes any sense or not.

Confusion arises over what KM is, and what it involves. According to me knowledge management is a integrated approach of creating,gathering,organizing and sharing information which can be in form of database,documents,procedures and also experience of individual ones which can be shared through an organization and appropriate applied.
According to Gartner (1996) also "KM is a discipline that promotes an integrated approach to identifying, managing and sharing all of an enterprise's information assets. These information assets may include databases, documents, policies and procedures, as well as previously unarticulated expertise and experience resident in individual workers." According to Skyrme (1997) "Knowledge management is the explicit and systematic management of vital knowledge and its associated processes of creating, gathering, organizing, diffusion, use and exploitation. It requires turning personal knowledge into corporate knowledge that can be widely shared throughout an organization and appropriately applied."

Knowledge management is the name of a concept in which an Organization consciously and comprehensively gathers, organizes, shares, and analyzes its knowledge in terms of resources, documents, and people skills. "Some Companies,like Caterpillar,have a graying employee/management base where about one third of their workforce will retire in the next five years. Caterpiller is looking at KM strategies to best acquire their knowledge.Expert systems can be a viable technology to assist in these knowledge management endeavors."
(Source:Knowledge management handbook by Jay Liebowitz,1999)

Here describe a four-process view of knowledge management :

(Source:In Information Week article, Jeff Angus and Jeetu Patel presents above chart )

For Example,Knowledge Management in Call Centers

In support and customer service departments like call centers, knowledge management (KM) refers to the strategies and tasks associated with developing and delivering relevant knowledge, efficiently and quickly, to meet evolving customer and support needs. Effective support of knowledge management optimizes knowledge creation, knowledge dissemination and consequently knowledge utilization.
Knowledge Creation: At this stage database is required to pre-understand customer buying behavior. Database provides detailed collected data about different customer interactions and transactions throughout the business locations. It transforms data into information, gives it concept to become knowledge that is useful for the management and planners. Database helps the organization, saves time by providing right message at the right time.
knowledge gathering: Using database in proper way,this process helps organization by providing specific customer offers and distribution channels, which organization uses for customer interaction and channels, treatment plans, and products and services. Analysis and Refinement: At this stage the organization learns about customer dialogs collected by capturing and analyzing data from customer interactions and refining messages, communications, prices, volumes, locations, approaches, and timings, and understanding specific responses to customer stimulus.
knowledge utilization: At this stage customer related information and offers are managed by using a variety of channels and front office applications, including customer care applications, sales applications. Customer is reached by using different interaction channels which includes Sales agent, retail branch, direct mail, Call center, Internet, ATM. The channel(s) that customers prefer to utilize is important. Thus, it becomes easy to deliver marketing messages and sales opportunities, and to handle service issues through these channels.

Some people like one of my class groups in our discussion, view Knowledge Management is an associated process of creation of data and then store them and dissemination information which can be in form of database, documents, procedures and also experience of individual ones. Others see KM is divided in mainly three processes: creation, disseminating and utilizing.But according to munir's group(2008) there is not always necessary that storage is present where knowledge transfer from tacit to tacit,but according to me for individuals storage is not must.but for organization it is required for gathering lots of information and managing them. While other group dismiss KM is an integrated approach of creation, purification (filtration), storage and dissemination; and it’s not designed particularly for organizations. So Knowledge management process can be generally categorized into knowledge gathering, organizing, refining, dissemination.

References

Gartner Group Inc, October 1996, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue18/knowledge-mgt/

Skyrme, D. Knowledge management: making sense of an oxymoron. 1997 (Management Insight, 2nd series, no 2) Web page ref http://www.skyrme.com/insights/22km.htm

Rasooli P and Albadvi A (2007) “Knowledge Management in Call Centres” The Electronic Journal of Knowledge Management Volume 5 Issue 3