ROLE OF IT IN KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT

The key for a successful I.T involvement in any knowledge management system is deciding the type of IT deployed in the knowledge management system.

The growing importance of knowledge as a critical business resource has made executives to examine the knowledge underlying their businesses, giving rise to knowledge management systems. Advances in IT have made it easier to acquire, store, or disseminate knowledge than ever before, many organizations are employing IT to facilitate sharing and integration of knowledge. Executives must often confront the challenging task of deciding what type of IT solutions to deploy in support of their KM systems. These lines are the basic criteria for IT deployment in any knowledge management systems.
There are two basic approaches to KM for which IT can provide support: codification and personalization.

Codification: Here more explicit and structured knowledge is codified and stored in knowledge bases. The main role of IT here is to help people share knowledge through common storage so as to achieve reuse of knowledge.
Example: Electronic knowledge repositories (EKR) : like knowledge is stored in an EKR from where the employees can share the knowledge through a common source so as it is available to one and all and can be also reused whenever knowledge is required .

Personalization: Here more tacit and unstructured knowledge is shared largely through direct personal communication. The main role of IT here is to help people locate each other and communicate facilitate and to achieve complex knowledge transfer.
Example : Knowledge expert directories and videoconferencing .here the knowledge is mainly unstructured and is achieved with personal communication between the members of an organization and by using IT tools such as video conferencing makes the complex knowledge relatively simpler to gain or maybe understand .

The various organizations deploying IT in their knowledge management systems can be classified as Product based and Service based organizations.

The product based and service based organizations have different competitive bases ,like we can say that in Product based organizations competition does not lie only in the products but also in the services and the marketing for the product . Therefore we can say that in such organizations knowledge can be gained from various areas and utilize in the right way to gain competitive advantage over other organizations.
Example: Microsoft produces software products and operates in rapidly changing environments where the rate of innovation and speed of new product development is crucial,
So here technical knowledge should be gained by the product development teams before the launch of the products and then the knowledge should also be provided to the sales team so as to gain competitive advantage.
Likewise in a Service based organization the competition depends mainly on the services offered.
Example : We can take the example of Blue Dart which is a courier service organization it has a clear viewpoint that it is mainly considered with the services provided by them that is the delivery is delivered on date and to the right place.


REFERENCE: A. Kankanhalli,Sutanto J ,and Bernard C.Y.Tan (2003), Communications of the ACM , ACM ,Volume 46 Issue 9 .

K.M Theory and Concepts

KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT THEORY AND CONCEPTS …



KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT......

After reading an article in the JOURNAL OF KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT . I came to a conclusion that in order to make an organization become more adaptive, innovative, intelligent and sustainable in the market it should have appropriate management of knowledge . And i can also came to one important conclusion that it is very important for organizations to know about the knowledge and use them to appropriate level in order to gain competitive advantage ,which was supported by the work of (Wong and Aspinwall, 2005). AND I agreed with the defination that
"Knowledge Management is getting the right information to the right people at the right time"

I agree to this because as i believe that knowledge is gain through experience and if some one has the right knowledge in context with his organizations it is already giving an organization a head start or you can even say a competitve advantage over other organizations , and as mentioned right time is also very important because it is of no use if it is aquired at the wrong time. I can herby say that knowledge management can give an organization the essential boost that is required for an organization to do good in the market like if an organization has the needed experience and is having good knowledge management systems it will clearly achieving its target if it is effeciently managed in context with the individual and the team and also again with the organization as a whole .

for example>>>
It can be kept in context with my organization as i was completely new to this organization i needed the right knowledge in order to understand how thus this organization functions and what do the various information given to me by my team suggests me about the organization as a whole and so that i could start working with them as a team and the right time was of utmost important because it is of no use if i am given the advanced knowledge of the organizations work even before i know the basics.

Reference : {Wong, K.Y. and Aspinwall, E. (2004), (2005), "Characterizing knowledge management in the small business environment" Journal of Knowledge Management, Vol. 8 No. 3, pp. 44-61. }



DATA .....

As I started working on the misuse of terms ,I personally felt that data and information are the same . Now I am cleared that " Data are the distinct pieces of an information "

examples-->> numbers and texts, bits ,bytes etc

Data can also be dfined as (facts and statistics used for reference or analysis )
Reference : Oxford dictionary

Like if we take in context with our organization data is all the input that each member of our organization get at team meetings i.e their individual perception.



INFORMATION.....

Information can be well described as the collection of data . Like we know by now that data are distinct pieces of information i.e. that when this distinct pieces are arranged in a particular way they provide us with the information .
It can be defined as (knowledge communicated or received concerning a particular fact .)

Reference : www.Dictionary.com

It can be said as we input our data in the group meeting of our organization it is at that maybe information for me but at the same time data for others ,so in order to make it a useful information for the organization we process the data with the organization perceptive and then this information is used .

examples>> weather report submited by the weather department