Knowledge management

Knowledge Management

BY:

Mohanad Ali Kareem MBA IV semester 2015

Department of Commerce and Business Administration Acharya Nagarjuna University

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UNIT- I

LEVERAGING KNOWLEDGE:

Knowledge evolves knowledge-leveraging practices with the communities that embody them. Knowledge-leveraging practices and communities — where practitioners think and act together to transform information and experience into insights and insights into products, services and competencies — enhance an organization‘s ability to live in change and thus, to continue to deliver value in the midst of uncertainty, paradox, complexity and the unknown. Knowledgeleveraging practices and communities engage the fullness of our human ability to learn, create, change. Thus, e-Knowledge adds value to knowledgeleveraging initiatives primarily by participating — as co-learner and empathic provocateur — in the journey of optimizing organizational performance.

Specific services include:  assessing an organization‘s knowledge base (its ―common sense‖ shaping its decisions and practices)  identifying and seeding communities that upgrade and leverage knowledge strategic to business strategy and core competencies  creating and implementing online collaboration environments to support communities of practice, e-learning, virtual teams;  developing database-driven solutions to complement face-to-face services as well as administrative, fundraising, marketing and evaluative functions;  offering the full range of ―Internet presence‖ services: web hosting, domain name registration, e-commerce, SSL certificates, Internet marketing.

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Knowledge Management: Knowledge management (KM) comprises a range of strategies and practices used in an organization to identify, create, represent, distribute, and enable adoption of insights and experiences.

Such insights and experiences comprise knowledge, either embodied in individuals or embedded in organizations as processes or practices.

Knowledge management efforts typically focus on organizational objectives such as improved performance, competitive advantage, innovation, the sharing of lessons learned, integration and continuous improvement of the organization.

"Knowledge management is a discipline that promotes an integrated approach to identifying, capturing, evaluating, retrieving, and sharing all of an enterprise's information assets. These assets may include databases, documents, policies, procedures, and previously un-captured expertise and experience in individual workers.

TYPES OF KNOWLEDGE:

 Knowledge is intangible, dynamic, and difficult to measure, but without it no organization can survive.  Tacit: or unarticulated knowledge is more personal, experiential, context specific, and hard to formalize; is difficult to communicate or share with others; and is generally in the heads of individuals and teams.  Explicit: explicit knowledge can easily be written down and codified.  Explicit Knowledge is knowledge that is consciously understood & can be articulated. In other words, knowledge the ―knower‖ is aware of & can talk about.

• Explicit knowledge – Objective, rational, technical – Policies, goals, strategies, papers, reports – Codified – Leaky knowledge • Tacit Knowledge is knowledge that ―knower‖ is not aware about.

• Tacit knowledge – Subjective, cognitive, experiential learning – Highly personalized – Difficult to formalize – Sticky knowledge 3

DATA, INFORMATION & KNOWLEDGE:

• Data are symbols • Information are the data that are processed to be useful; provides answers to "who", "what", "where", and "when" questions.

• Knowledge is nothing but application of data and information; answers "how" questions.

• Data is raw. It simply exists and has no significance beyond its existence.

It can exist in any form, usable or not. It does not have meaning of itself.

In computer parlance, a spreadsheet generally starts out by holding data.

• Information is data that has been given meaning by way of relational connection. This "meaning" can be useful, but does not have to be. In computer parlance, a relational database makes information from the data stored within it.

• Knowledge is the appropriate collection of information, such that it's intent is to be useful.

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Organizational knowledge: is a newly emerging, interdisciplinary business model that has knowledge within the framework of an organization as its focus.

Organizational knowledge supports & coordinates the creation, transfer & application of individual knowledge into value creation process.

Organizational knowledge is a process which helps organizations to identify, select, organize, disseminate, and transfer important information and expertise that are part of organization‘s memory.

Characteristics of Organizational knowledge:  Extraordinary leverage and increasing returns  Fragmentation , Leakage, and the need to refresh  Uncertain value  Uncertain value of sharing  Rooted in time

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Components of organizational knowledge:  People  Process  Technology people

organizational knowledge Technologies

Processes

1. People – People manage the system and processes.

– Need is to convince people about the benefits of strategic knowledge management.

2. Processes – Careful management of the alignment of strategies, principles, processes and practices needs to be done.

3. Technologies – Contributor to the health and effectiveness of the organization.

knowledge management program: A winning knowledge management program increases staff productivity, product and service quality, and deliverable consistency by capitalizing on intellectual and knowledge-based assets.

Many organizations leap into a knowledge management solution (e.g. document management, data mining, blogging, and community forums) without first considering the purpose or objectives they wish to fulfill or how the organization will adopt and follow best practices for managing its knowledge assets long term.

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A successful knowledge management program will consider more than just technology. An organization should also consider 

People. They represent how you increase the ability of individuals within the organization to influence others with their knowledge.



Processes. They involve how you establish best practices and governance for the efficient and accurate

identification,

management, and

dissemination of knowledge. 

Technology. It addresses how you choose, configure, and utilize tools and automation to enable knowledge management.



Structure. It directs how you transform organizational structures to facilitate and encourage cross-discipline awareness and expertise.



Culture. It embodies how you establish and cultivate a knowledgesharing, knowledge-driven culture.

Challenges of program:

Implementing a knowledge management

Implementing a knowledge management program is no easy feat. You will encounter many challenges along the way including many of the following: 

Inability to recognize or articulate knowledge; turning tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge.



Geographical distance and/or language barriers in an international company.

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

Limitations of information and communication technologies.



Loosely defined areas of expertise.



Internal conflicts (e.g. professional territoriality).



Lack of incentives or performance management goals.



Poor training or mentoring programs.



Cultural barriers (e.g. ―this is how we've always done it‖ mentality).

The following eight-step approach will enable you to identify these challenges so you can plan for them, thus minimizing the risks and maximizing the rewards. This approach was developed based on logical, tried-and-true activities for implementing any new organizational program. The early steps involve strategy, planning, and requirements gathering while the later steps focus on execution and continual improvement.

Step 1: Establish Knowledge Management Program Objectives Before selecting a tool, defining a process, and developing workflows, you should envision and articulate the end state. In order to establish the appropriate program objectives, identify and document the business problems that need resolution and the business drivers that will provide momentum and justification for the endeavor.

Step 2: Prepare for Change Knowledge management is more than just an application of technology. It involves cultural changes in the way employees perceive and share knowledge they develop or possess. One common cultural hurdle to increasing the sharing Step 3: Define High-Level Process To facilitate the effective management of your organization's knowledge assets, you should begin by laying out a high-level knowledge management process. The process can be progressively developed with detailed procedures and work instructions throughout steps four, five, and six. However, it should be finalized and approved prior to step seven (implementation).

Step 4: Determine and Prioritize Technology Needs Depending on the program objectives established in step one and the process controls and criteria defined in step three, you can begin to determine and prioritize your knowledge management technology needs. With such a variety of knowledge management solutions, it is imperative to understand the cost and benefit of each type of technology and the primary technology providers in the marketplace.

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Step 5: Assess Current State Now that you've established your program objectives to solve your business problem, prepared for change to address cultural issues, defined a high-level process to enable the effective management of your knowledge assets, and determined and prioritized your technology needs that will enhance and automate knowledge management related activities, you are in a position to assess the current state of knowledge management within your organization.

Step 6: Build a Knowledge Management Implementation Roadmap With the current-state assessment in hand, it is time to build the implementation roadmap for your knowledge management program. But before going too far, you should re-confirm senior leadership's support and commitment, as well as the funding to implement and maintain the knowledge management program.

Step 7: Implementation Implementing a knowledge management program and maturing the overall effectiveness of your organization will require significant personnel resources and funding. Be prepared for the long haul, but at the same time, ensure that incremental advances are made and publicized.

Step 8: Measure and Improve the Knowledge Management Program How will you know your knowledge management investments are working? You will need a way of measuring your actual effectiveness and comparing that to anticipated results. If possible, establish some baseline measurements in order to capture the before shot of the organization‘s performance prior to implementing the knowledge management program. Then, after implementation, trend and compare the new results to the old results to see how performance has improved.

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UNIT- I I

IT in Knowledge Management:  KM systems are developed using three sets of technologies communication, collaboration, and storage and retrieval  Several technologies supported KM are: Artificial intelligence  Intelligent agents  Knowledge discovery databases  Extensible markup Language (XML)  Information technology, by itself is not KM  However, o KM is often facilitated by IT o IT provides solutions to KM o IT is a tool to increase the ―efficiency‖ and ―capability‖ of KM  facilitates document management, data storage, access of information, the dissemination, exchange and sharing of ideas

Knowledge Enhancing efficiency!

Knowledge management Information technology

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Higher productivity!

KM systems classification based on observations on the KM systems implementations:    

Knowledge Discovery Systems Knowledge Capture Systems Knowledge Sharing Systems Knowledge Application Systems

KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT TOOLS: The development of IT for organisations has produced many successful ERP-type systems that manage well-defined processes. But systems to manage ill-defined, knowledge intensive processes have met with less success. KM practitioners use a wide range of IT tools to share, create, codify, and share knowledge. The trend in the development of IT for organisations is toward more communication and collaboration tools.

A number of tools are available to support the functionalities and processes of KM, which are listed below: (i) Tools to access knowledge:These tools provide access to explicit knowledge that can be shared and transferred Convera is a tool used for retrieval ware. It works on powerful indexing systems to classify expertise based on both content and collaboration dynamics and networks within the enterprise. (ii) Tools for semantic mapping: These tools are meant to quickly support presentation of information, analysis, and decision making. Ontology tools are also part of this category as they enable users to organize information and knowledge by groups and schemata that represent the organizational knowledge base. (iii) Tools for knowledge extraction: These tools support structured queries and replies. They help mining text by interpreting relationships among different elements and documents.

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(iv) Tools for expertise localization: These tools enable quick location of the knowledge holders in the enterprise and facilitate collaboration and knowledge exchange. For example, ActiveNet maintains a continuous, real-time view of organisational activities. (v) Tools for collaboration work: These tools enable teams to globally share dedicated spaces for managing the project lifecycle; editing and publishing materials; conducting live discussions and interactions.

Other tools of knowledge management :  Email or messaging  Document management  Search engines  Enterprise information portal  Data warehouse  Groupware  Workflow management  Web-based training

Data Warehouse and data mining : Data Warehouse: • A single, complete and consistent store of data obtained from a variety of different sources made available to end users in a what they can understand and use in a business context.

• A process of transforming data into information and making it available to users in a timely enough manner to make a difference.

•

Data warehousing refers to single, centralized, and unified repository of data that works across the enterprise.

•

A data warehouse is subject-oriented, integrated, time-varying, nonvolatile collection of data that is used primarily in organizational decision making.

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Database with the following distinctive characteristics: • Separate from operational databases • Subject oriented: provides a simple, concise view on one or more selected areas, in support of the decision process • Constructed by integrating multiple, heterogeneous data sources • Contains historical data: spans a much longer time horizon than operational databases • (Mostly) Read-Only access: periodic, infrequent updates

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Data mining: • Data mining refers to extracting or mining knowledge from large amount of data.

• Data mining is also known as knowledge discovery in database.

• Data mining software tools find hidden pattern and relationships in large pool of data and infer rules from them that can be used to predict future behavior guide.

• The major reason why data mining gained a great deal of attraction is due to wide availability of data and imminent need of turning that data into information and knowledge.

• The mining of gold from sand or rocks is referred to as gold mining rather than rock or sand mining. Thus data mining should have been named knowledge mining from data.

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Data Mining: A KDD Process Pattern Evaluation

– Data mining: the core of knowledge discovery Data Mining process.

Task-relevant Data

Data Warehouse Data Cleaning Data Integration Databases

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Selection

UNIT- I I I Companies on the road to knowledge management : 1- Assessment of Impacts on employees : KM can impact an organization‘s employees by facilitating their learning from each other, from prior experiences of former employees, and from external sources. KM can also enable employees to become more flexible by enhancing their awareness of new ideas, which prepares them to respond to changes and also by making them more likely to accept change.

2- Assessment of Impacts on Processes: KM

can

improve

organizational

processes—for

example

marketing,

manufacturing, accounting, engineering, public relations, and so forth. These improvements can occur along three major dimensions: effectiveness, efficiency, and degree of innovation of the processes.

3- Assessment of Impacts on product: KM can also impact the organization‘s products by helping to produce either value-added products or inherently knowledge-based products. Value-added products are new or improved products that provide a significant additional value as compared to earlier products. Inherently knowledge-based products refer for example to products from the consulting and software development industries.

4- Assessment of Impacts on organizational Performance: KM can impact overall organizational performance either directly or indirectly.

Direct impacts concern revenues and/or costs, and can be explicitly linked to the organization‘s vision or strategy. Consequently direct impact can be observed in

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terms of increased sales, decreased costs, and higher profitability or return on investment.

KM in manufacturing and service : enables improvements in organizational processes such as marketing, manufacturing, accounting, engineering, and public relations •These impacts can be seen along three major dimensions  Effectiveness  Efficiency  Degree of innovation of the processes • Effectiveness is performing the most suitable processes and making the best possible decisions • Efficiency is performing the processes quickly and in a low-cost fashion.

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• Innovation is performing the processes in a creative and novel fashion, that improves effectiveness and efficiency—or at least marketability.

KM can enable organizations to become more effective by helping them to select and perform the most appropriate processes.

• Impact on products can be: – Value added products – Knowledge based products

knowledge management

Value-added Products

knowledge

Knowledge Knowledge-based products

Challenges in KM: 1. Developing a working definition of knowledge: Not developing a working definition of knowledge is a critical error contributing directly to many errors and failures in the knowledge-management process.

2. Dealing with Tacit Knowledge and Utilization of IT : Very difficult to articulate tacit knowledge- highly situated in the context and to abstract it from its context of application would mean to lose much of its intrinsic meaning and value.

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3. Adaptation to Cultural Complexity: Inappropriate culture is generally regarded as the key inhibitor of effective knowledge sharing.

4. Attention to Human Resources : Success of any KM initiative is critically dependent on having competent and suitably motivated people taking an active role in the process.

5. Developing New Organizational Structures: Developing a new organizational structure must be balanced with the crucial need for business continuity.

6. Coping with Increased Competition: Intense worldwide competition forces the firms to take new actions responding to environmental demands, pressures, and challenges almost day to day.

Future of knowledge management : 1-The Importance Of Support From Top Management.

2-The Importance of Communication.

3-The Importance of Creativity .

4-The Importance of Culture and People.

5- The Importance of Sharing Knowledge.

6- The Importance of Incentives.

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Unit-4

Stages of Knowledge Management Process: The process of knowledge management is universal for any enterprise.

Step 1: Collecting  This is the most important step of the knowledge management process.  If you collect the incorrect or irrelevant data, the resulting knowledge may not be the most accurate.  Therefore, the decisions made based on such knowledge could be inaccurate as well.  The data collection procedure defines certain data collection points.

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Step 2: Organizing • The data collected need to be organized. This organization usually happens based on certain rules. These rules are defined by the organization.

• As an example, all sales related data can be filed together and all staff related data could be stored in the same database table. This type of organization helps to maintain data accurately within a database.

• If there is much data in the database, techniques such as 'normalization' can be used for organizing and reducing the duplication.

• This way, data is logically arranged and related to one another for easy retrieval. When data passes step 2, it becomes information.

Step 3: Summarizing • In this step, the information is summarized in order to take the essence of it. The lengthy information is presented in tabular or graphical format and stored appropriately.

• For summarizing, there are many tools that can be used such as software packages, charts (Pareto, cause-and-effect), and different techniques.

Step 4: Analyzing • At this stage, the information is analyzed in order to find the relationships, redundancies, and patterns.

• An expert or an expert team should be assigned for this purpose as the experience of the person / team plays a vital role. Usually, there are reports created after analysis of information.

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Step 5: Synthesizing • At this point, information becomes knowledge. The results of analysis (usually the reports) are combined together to derive various concepts and artifacts.

• A pattern or behavior of one entity can be applied to explain another and collectively, the organization will have a set of knowledge elements that can be used across the organization.

• This knowledge is then stored in the organizational knowledge base for further use.

Step 6: Decision Making:  At this stage, the knowledge is used for decisions making. As an example, when estimating a specific type of a project or a task, the knowledge related to previous estimates can be used.  This accelerates the estimation process and adds high accuracy. This is how the organizational knowledge management adds value and save money in the long run.

KNOWLEDGE CAPITAL VS PHYSICAL CAPITAL : KNOWLEDGE CAPITAL

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PHYSICAL CAPITAL

Business Ethics in Knowledge management: # Knowledge and skills are valuable but not easily "own able" as objects. Nor is it obvious who has the greater rights to an idea: the company who trained the employee, or the employee themselves? The country in which the plant grew, or the company which discovered and developed the plant's medicinal potential?

As a result, attempts to assert ownership and ethical disputes over ownership arise. # Patent infringement, copyright infringement, trademark infringement. # Misuse of the intellectual property systems to stifle competition: patent misuse, copyright misuse, patent troll, submarine patent. # Even the notion of intellectual property itself has been criticized on ethical grounds: see intellectual property. # Employee raiding: the practice of attracting key employees away from a competitor to take unfair advantage of the knowledge or skills they may possess. # The practice of employing all the most talented people in a specific field, regardless of need, in order to prevent any competitors emloin them.

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Unit-5

The role of knowledge management in organizational restructuring : O Companies restructure for various reasons are mentioned under portfolio strategy, mergers and acquisition & turn around management O It may be expansion or contraction of portfolio O Changes in nature, volume of business, business condition etc O It helps to prevent a unit from becoming sick Organizational Restructuring: Restructuring strategy designed to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of personnel, through significant changes in the organizational structure.

Is a response changes in the business and related environments.

Takes the form of divestiture and acquisitions

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7 Key Organizational Levers of KM

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Learning Organization: A learning organization is an organization skilled at creating, acquiring, interpreting, transferring, and retaining knowledge, and at purposely modifying its behavior to reflect new knowledge and insights. ►the one that has developed the capacity to adopt and change. ►the one that uses new information which challenges accepted organizational norms and practices…..to reexamine the way in which the organization performs its functions, and thus helps the organization ‗unlearn‘ its previously used dysfunctional patterns. ►the one in which people at all levels, individually and collectively, are continually increasing their capacity to produce results they really care about.

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Four Tasks Of a Learning Organization: ◘ Designing learning settings. ◘ Promoting a culture of learning. ◘ Leading a learning process. ◘ Demonstrating personal investment in learning.

Characteristics of a Learning Organization:

System Thinking

Shared vision

Team Learning Senge’s 5 Disciplines

Mental Models

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Personal Mastery

How KM operates in an Organization Value to Organization Active Knowledge Transfer

Repositories • Best Practices

• Reports • Documents

Organizational Learning

• Contact Links

• Expert Assistance as Needed

• Presentation Slides

• Tips

• Expert Knowledge Base

Decision Making Tools • Profiles for Customization

• Communities of Practice Index

• Pushed Reports & News

• Collaboration Tools

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