Knowledge Management

Today’s business environment is characterized by continuous, often radical change. Such a volatile climate demands a new attitude and approach within organizations—actions must be anticipatory, adaptive, and based on a faster cycle of knowledge creation.
Knowledge Management (KM) provides the processes and structures to create, capture, analyze, and act on information. It highlights both the conduits to knowledge, as well as the bottlenecks. The emphasis in Knowledge Management is on human know-how and how to exploit it to bring maximum return for an organization.
The Benefits of Knowledge Management
Whether to minimize loss and risk, improve organizational efficiency, or embrace innovation, Knowledge Management efforts and initiatives add great value to an organization. Knowledge Management:
Facilitates better, more informed decisions
Contributes to the intellectual capital of an organization
Encourages the free flow of ideas which leads to insight and innovation
Eliminates redundant processes, streamlines operations, and enhances employee retention rates
Improves customer service and efficiency
Can lead to greater productivity.
Knowledge Management does not have a beginning and an end. It is ongoing, organic, and ever-evolving.
Understanding Knowledge Management
The challenge of Knowledge Management is to determine what information within an organization qualifies as "valuable." All information is not knowledge, and all knowledge is not valuable. The key is to find the worthwhile knowledge within a vast sea of information.
KM is about people. It is directly linked to what people know, and how what they know can support business and organizational objectives. It draws on human competency, intuition, ideas, and motivations. It is not a technology-based concept. Although technology can support a KM effort, it shouldn’t begin there.
KM is orderly and goal-directed. It is inextricably tied to the strategic objectives of the organization. It uses only the information that is the most meaningful, practical, and purposeful.
KM is ever-changing. There is no such thing as an immutable law in KM. Knowledge is constantly tested, updated, revised, and sometimes even "obsoleted" when it is no longer practicable. It is a fluid, ongoing process.
KM is value-added. It draws upon pooled expertise, relationships, and alliances. Organizations can further the two-way exchange of ideas by bringing in experts from the field to advise or educate managers on recent trends and developments. Forums, councils, and boards can be instrumental in creating common ground and organizational cohesiveness.
KM is visionary. This vision is expressed in strategic business terms rather than technical terms, and in a manner that generates enthusiasm, buy-in, and motivates managers to work together toward reaching common goals.
KM is complementary. It can be integrated with other organizational learning initiatives such as Total Quality Management (TQM). It is important for knowledge managers to show interim successes along with progress made on more protracted efforts such as multiyear systems developments infrastructure, or enterprise architecture projects.