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Taking a Look at Knowledge Management

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In order to understand knowledge management, it is important to start by defining what knowledge is. Knowledge is the full utilization of information and data, coupled with the potential of people's skills, competencies, ideas, intuitions, commitments and motivations. In today’s dynamic and complex business environment, the desire for knowledge has increased even more with the scope and content changed dramatically, often spreading outside the organization.

Firstly, Polanyi (1958) coined the term “tacit” and divided knowledge into tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge based on the degree of expression and he says “We know more than we can tell”. Tacit knowledge is the knowledge embedded in people’s mind, usually easy to observe but hard to formalize and communicate to others. A good example given for it is the knowledge on how to ride a bicycle or drive a car. Whereas for the explicit knowledge can be easily captured and stored, hence it can be transferred and communicated to others. The most common form of explicit knowledge is manuals, documents, procedures and others.

What is knowledge management? According to experts, it fosters the creation, accumulation, organization, reuse, retrieval, sharing, and transfer of knowledge in organizations (Alavi and Leidner, 2001; Liebowitz, 1999). Wiig, also defined it as a group of clearly defined process or methods used to search important knowledge among different knowledge management operations. The Gartner Group (2005) has

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