Organizational performance is driven by knowledge, which provides a competitive advantage. Employees across a wide range of businesses are capable of sharing knowledge regardless of industry niche and business offering.
However, many businesses are still unwilling to address this trend, even as they have increasingly realized the importance of cultivating a work environment that respects and fosters knowledge accumulation and application.
A successful venture relies on a carefully thought-out plan, and its implementation necessitates deep technical skills, effective employee collaboration, and deep business knowledge. In that regard, knowledge management plays an important role.
Knowledge Management – What is it?
Management of knowledge is the process of using tools, strategies, and practices in order to enhance the productivity of an organization.
Knowledge Management
An organization’s knowledge and information can be captured, stored, shared, and managed through knowledge management (KM).
The practice promotes an integrated approach that identifies and captures knowledge, generates and stores assets such as documents and software, and facilitates its effective retrieval and dissemination within the organization.
Back in the Day…
Consumption of information has always been the driving force behind human behavior. Peter Drucker, the business guru, is credited with spreading the knowledge management concept in the early or mid 1980s because he is known as a business guru.
Knowledge management was all about documenting everything. There was, however, a high risk of document storage becoming overly complex and extensive as well as quickly becoming outdated, making it hard to sort through – annoying employees to the point where they had to reinvent the wheel again and again.
The problem is that knowledge is often confined in team silos with a general reluctance to share, as it is regarded as ‘power’, and sharing it means losing that power.
Knowledge management developed from the need for new approaches to capture and store knowledge for future use, as well as to promote a culture of knowledge sharing.
Knowledge Management’s Main Areas
It is important to distinguish between explicit, tacit, and implicit knowledge. Tacit knowledge differs from explicit knowledge in that it is based more on innate abilities or on-the-job experience and can be more difficult to convey.
Implicit knowledge is knowledge that isn’t tangible at first but can be turned into something tangible, such as dictating a speech. All of these types of knowledge are captured and disseminated by knowledge management. Understanding it requires that you understand three key aspects.
Learning from Experience
Identifying all existing and potential knowledge sources in your organization is part of this process. It is not enough to collect documents and brochures; you must also identify subject matter experts who can provide content that can be shared.
Keeping Track of knowledge
Using this system, all knowledge content will be organized under categories that will be easy to access. As an example, tacit knowledge can be recorded as case studies, blog posts, videos, or infographics by the experts in your team.
Learning From Each Other
The knowledge must be distributed to everyone who needs it, and your employees must be encouraged to utilize the system regularly. Incentives for learning and knowledge management champions can help accomplish this.