KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT & DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEMS

Discussion 01 06-09-2013

Dr Sajid Hussain Awan

Contents

KM an overview KM Stages Defining knowledge. What is knowledge management? What do we need to know? How do we support it? How should companies integrate KM tools and process? What is the framework for understanding KM?

KM Significance

Knowledge Management has exhibited remarkable staying power and growth in a fashion that is dramatically different from other business enthusiasms of the late twentieth century.

General perception

At the beginning of a seminar, conference, or training session, when participants are asked to define Knowledge Management, they often respond that: It is the latest management fad. Many say that Knowledge Management is an oxymoron. Numerous people believe that knowledge, by definition, cannot be managed. On the other hand, most people agree that all work involves a knowledge component, and that any team uses knowledge, experience, and know-how as a resource in the process of completing any task or project.

General perception

Students in an executive management program in 2002 at the Graduate School of Business (GSB) at the University of Cape Town in South Africa responded to the question What does Knowledge Management mean to you? Their answers are similar to statements heard in other programs in corporate and academic settings around the world.

General perception

Knowledge Management is:

What

the company knows about competitors, processes. Learning from experience. Electronic libraries and databases. A systematic way of disseminating information and best practices. What we need to know, finding it, and using it to add value and get to a higher level of productivity. Energizing peoples experiences and thoughts to make the organization grow.

General perception
Formulating

strategies and implementing them to integrate knowledge or information. Effective use of skills and expertise in the organization. Exchanging new and old ideas for the growth of the company. An enabler to drive continuous improvement in the organization. Obtaining external information, customer information, and competitive information Communication technology.

Knowledge management An overview

Knowledge management (KM) as a business concept, though has earlier antecedents, evolved in the late 1980s. It sprang from the combination of the recognition of the importance to a firm of its information and knowledge assets, and from the appearance of the Internet and the recognition of the utility of the Internet as an information and knowledge sharing tool, particularly for geographically dispersed organizations.

KM stages

KM has gone through four stages:

1.

2.

3.

4.

An emphasis upon the new technology, the Internet, and upon the development of best practices or lessons learned. An increased recognition of human and cultural factors, and upon the development of communities of practice to facilitate the sharing of information. An increased recognition of the importance of designing the systems for retrievability, and the importance of data design and taxonomies. An emphasis upon extending KM systems beyond the parent organization to include, for example, vendors and suppliers, customers, users, alumni, etc.

Defining knowledge

Knowledge is a fluid mix of framed experience, values, contextual information, expert insight, and grounded intuition that provides an environment and framework for evaluating and incorporating new experiences and information. It originates and is applied in the minds of knowers. In organizations, it often becomes embedded not only in documents or repositories, but also in organizational routines, processes, practices and norms.

Defining knowledge
Knowledge consists of truths, and beliefs, perspectives and concepts, judgments and expectations, methodologies and know-how. Knowledge is the whole set of insights, experiences, and procedures that are considered correct and true and that therefore guide the thoughts, behaviors, and communications of the people. Knowledge is reasoning about the information and data to actively enable performance, problem-solving, decisionmaking, learning, and teaching.

What is KM?

Knowledge Management is a process that:

an organizations intellectual assets creates new knowledge for competitive advantage imparts corporate information accessible imparts best practices harnesses IT such as corporate networks, groupware and intranets.
identifies

What is KM?

Knowledge management is a systematic, explicit, and deliberate building, renewal, and application of knowledge to maximize an enterprises knowledge-related effectiveness and returns from its knowledge assets.

What is KM?

Knowledge management is the formalization of and access to experience , knowledge, and expertise that create new capabilities, enable superior performance, encourage innovation, and enhance custom value.

What is KM?

KM involves the identification and analysis of available and required knowledge, and the subsequent planning and control of actions to develop knowledge assets so as to fulfill organization objectives.

KM as a process
KM is the process of creating value from an organizations intangible assets. KM is defined as a process through which organizations create, store and utilize their collective knowledge. KM is the process of capturing companys collective expertise whenever it resides-in databases, on paper, or in peoples headsand distributing it to whenever if can help produces the biggest profit.

KM organizational aspects
KM is getting the right knowledge to the right people at the right time so they can make the best decision. KM is the art of creating value from an organizations intangible assets.

KM organizational aspects

KM is the explicit control and management of knowledge within the organization aimed at achieving the companys objective. KM means exactly the management of organizational knowledge of creating greater value and generating a competitive advantage.

Difference between data, information, & knowledge

Knowledge
Interpreted symbol structures - used to interpret data, elaborate on information, and learn - used withun the decision steps

Elaboration

Learning

Information

Interpreted symbols and symbol structures - input to a decision step - output from a decision step

Data interpretation

Data

Observed uninterpreted symbols - signs, character sequences, patterns

Difference between data, information, & knowledge

Definition Example

Data is basically just raw facts and figures. No single piece of data can be useful by itself, as it does not provide good business information Information is data which has been processed and has now got some meaning behind it. Knowledge is an understanding of the information which has been given.

The number 40 is data

40% of people work as per described roles

Those 40% of people work as per defined roles in sales department that contributes effectively to the sales growth of the firms products. This also shows that 60% of the sales force either does not work satisfactorily or they may be further evaluated to help raise the number of compliance to the laid down procedures.

Transition from data administration to KM

Time Mid 1970s Focus on DB administration,

Mid 1980s Late 1980s 1990s Late 1990s/2000s

Data administration Data management Information management Knowledge management

Roots of KM
Organizational science Computer science and management information systems Management science Psychology and sociology

Related management areas

Change management Quality management Human resource management Innovation management Strategic management

The philosophy of KM

KM framework helps understand the role of knowledge management in modern competitive and innovative organizations. KM helps create human-centered flexible enterprise-wide information infrastructure that effectively supports knowledge capturing, storage, development, distribution and transfer. KM tools, such as knowledge flow enablers, knowledge navigation systems and tools, corporate memories, knowledge repositories aim at identification, creation, storage, supplying, access, dissemination, reuse and preservation of knowledge in knowledge base.

KM components

Knowledge flow:
The

flow of knowledge Knowledge cryptography Communities of knowledge workers Knowledge repositories and libraries

The KM field

We need to develop new kinds of professional expertise and knowledge. The knowledge management approach would be that training provides employees with the knowledge, abilities and skills required by the post. Huselid (1995) uses two factors to group the practices requiring a high level of commitment, the first of which designates employee and organized structure capabilities, including a wide range of practices aimed at developing the knowledge, abilities and capabilities of employees.

KM refined

At its heart, Knowledge Management is the systems, procedures, approaches, and culture you put in place to manage one of your more valuable corporate assets namely, your knowledge (i.e. the knowhow, experience, insight, and capability that allow your teams and individuals to make correct and rapid decisions in support of strategy). Knowledge is a difficult asset to manage, being intangible, fluid, personal, elusive, invisible, immeasurable, and ever evolving. However, many of the other intangible corporate assets such as safety, brand, reputation, customer loyalty, and so on are already being actively managed, with positive results.

Why not knowledge?

Even if the intangible nature of knowledge means it cannot be directly controlled, you can at least manage the systems, cultures, and pathways through which knowledge flows around the organization.

References

Sveiby, K.-S., & Simons, R. (2002). Collaborative climate and effectiveness of knowledge work an empirical study. Journal of Knowledge Management, 6(5), 420433. Journal of Knowledge Management. Emerald Knowledge and Information Systems Knowledge Management Research & Practice Knowledge Organization Knowledge-Based Systems Decision Support Systems, ScienceDirect, Elsevier