The Importance Of Knowledge

Management Management Essay

For assignment help please contact
at help@hndassignmenthelp.co.uk or hndassignmenthelp@gmail.com
Knowledge is quite distinct from data and information in nature. Data includes facts,
observations, or perceptions which may or may not be true. Information, according
to is the content that represents analyzed data. Knowledge is defined in an area as
justified true beliefs about relationships among concepts relevant to that particular
area.
The skills required for effective knowledge management are to identify, generate,
acquire, diffuse and capture the most valuable benefits of knowledge that sets up a
strategic advantage to the organizations.
Knowledge life cycle consists of: creation, mobilization, diffusion and
commoditization to explain the early emerging knowledge to it maturity.

INTRODUCTION
The knowledge has been created more and more nowadays. The important of
knowledge management is recognized and effectively implement by many
organizations.
In this brief essay, I will explain the differences between knowledge and information.
After that, there will be the discussion of the importance of knowledge management
in the organization as well as how effective knowledge management can create
competitive advantage for the organization. Also, the essay explains the skills
required to effectively implement knowledge management process in the workplace
through the explanation of knowledge life cycle.

NATURE OF KNOWLEDGE

According to Fernandez (2004), to define knowledge, we need to distinguish it from

data and information. Although they are sometimes used interchangeably,
knowledge is quite distinct from data and information in nature.
Firstly, data includes facts, observations, or perceptions which may or may not be
true. By itself, data shows the raw numbers or assertions and may therefore be
devoid of context, meaning, or intent. However, it can be easily captured, stored, and
communicated using electronic or other media (Fernadez, 2004). For example, the
schedule of movies will be show in a day, or observation of number of left-handers in
a group of people illustrates data.
Information, according to Dalkir (2005), is the content that represents analyzed
data. Also, Fernandez (2004) defined information as a subset of data, which only
includes those data that possess context, relevance, and purpose. It means that
information manipulates raw data to obtain a more meaningful indication of trends
or patterns in the data. For example, for the cinema director, the numbers indicating
the daily sold tickets (in dollars, quality, or percentage of daily sales) of each movie
are considered information. So, the director can use such information to make
decisions concerning pricing and extra or cancel some movie shows.
According to Fernandez (2004), there are two different ways to distinguish
knowledge from data and information. The first one considers knowledge to be at
highest level in a hierarchy with information at the middle level, and data to be at the
lowest level. By this view, knowledge refers to information that enables action and
decisions, or information with direction. Although, knowledge is the richest and
deepest of the three, and is consequently also the most valuable, it is intrinsically
similar to information and data.
In the more complete perspective way, according to which knowledge is intrinsically
different form information, knowledge is defined in an area as justified true beliefs
about relationships among concepts relevant to that particular area (Nonaka, 1994).
For example, the daily sold tickets can be used, along with other information such as
information on the pop corns and soft drinks sold at the cinema, to compute the total
revenue. The relationship between the information is an example of knowledge.
Hence, as what I understand, knowledge is how people get information from data, or
more valuable information from less valuable information.

THE IMPORTANCE OF KNOWLEDGE

MANAGEMENT IN THE ORGANIZATION
Knowledge management was defined by Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995) as the process
of applying a systematic approach to the capture, structure, management, and
dissemination of knowledge throughout an organization in order to work faster,
reuse best practices, and reduce cost of rework from project to project. It means that
Knowledge management is the logical process that helps people to use knowledge
effectively and efficiently.
There are 4 business drivers that make knowledge management become important
and increase in application for today according to Dalkir (2005). Firstly, the
globalization of business means that the expansion of organization to global with
multisite, multilingual, and multicultural in nature. The expansion results in the
more complex work environment that all organizations have to face because of the
increase in the number of subjective knowledge items. The second driver is the
leaner organization. As the required work environment, people need to work faster
and smarter as knowledge worker to adopting an increased pace and workload.
Another business driver is the corporate amnesia. This driver explains that people as
a workforce is no longer expect to spend entire work life with the same organization
which will create problems of knowledge continuity for the organization and places
continuous learning demands on the knowledge worker. Finally, technological
advances make people more connected. The advances in information technology not
only have made connectivity ubiquitous but have radically changed expectations,
which workers are expected to be on at all times.
Base on the importance of the knowledge management, all organizations need to
develop a suitable and effective approach to manage their knowledge. By doing so,
they will get many benefits to create competitive advantages. At first, effective
knowledge management approach will provide many benefits to each individual
employees of the organization. It helps the employees in doing their job and save
time through better decision making and problem solving. It builds a sense of
community bonds within the organization and helps people to keep up to date. It also
provides challenges and opportunities for employees to contribute. The effective
approach also brings benefits to organization. It helps drive strategy for organization,
solves problems more quickly, and diffuses best practices. Also, it improves
knowledge embedded in products and services. It cross-fertilizes ideas and increases
opportunities for innovation. In addition, it enables organizations to stay ahead of
the competition better, and builds organizational memory.

Therefore, in my point of view, knowledge management is essential for all type of

business nowadays. With an effective knowledge management, the organization can
facilitate collaboration and help knowledge worker connected. It also helps
organization in making decision base on complete, valid and well interpreted data,
information, and knowledge.

LEADERSHIP AND THE SKILLS REQUIRED TO

EFFECTIVELY IMPLEMENT KNOWLEDGE
MANAGEMENT PROCESSES IN THE
WORKPLACE
Nowadays, most of organizations realize that the important of managing knowledge
effectively. For doing so, they need to be always able to identify, generate, acquire,
diffuse and capture the most valuable benefits of knowledge that sets up a strategic
advantage to themselves. It also needs to have the ability to differentiate the
information, which is digitizable, and true knowledge assets, which can only exist
with in the context of an intelligent system (Dalkir, 2005). To be able to clearly
understand the requirements for effectively implement knowledge management
processes in the workplace, we may discuss the knowledge life cycle and strategies in
each stages of the cycle.

KNOWLEDGE LIFE CYCLE:

Base on the research of Birmingham and Sheehan (2002), knowledge has a life cycle.
Their study had showed that new knowledge is born as uncertainty thing, and it form
into shape as it is tested, matures through implementation in reality, is diffused to a
growing user, and finally becomes broadly understood and recognize as common
practice. The knowledge can process through four stages of knowledge life cycle:
creation, mobilization, diffusion and commoditization.

Creation:
At this stage, knowledge first appears in someoneâs head as an idea. In fact,
no one can fully understand the idea or emerging knowledge, even if person creating
it. In doing business, the suitable strategy in this early stage is to test the idea on its
commercial viability. To encourage this activity, organizations need to create an
environment which requires adjustments in the following areas:

Informal Knowledge System: the organizations can lay out their space in an open
plan that has many common areas, give their employees time to experiment, and
provide resources for training programs and conferences in order to grow up
knowledge effectively.
Information Technology Systems: technology should be considered to connect people
who have interest at highly specialized internet forums rather than to codify and
store emerging knowledge.
Human Resources: organizations regularly create knowledge should hire people in
using new knowledge for critical feedback.
External Relationship: the contact with external customers and suppliers will
encourage the experimental of new idea.

Mobilization:
In this stage, knowledge continues to be improved, and the organization will extract
more value from it. To achieve it, organizations need to mobilize knowledge
internally and keep it away from outsiders. There are approaches for doing that:
Informal Knowledge System: the organization can encourage the internal
transferences among employees by building an internal network.
Information Technology Systems: the IT should focus on technology that can enable
the informal transfer of knowledge, and the system need to make it possible for
adding comments on the subject from users.
Human Resources: thinkers, doers, mavericks and pragmatists are needed in order
to fully transform new ideas into valuable knowledge.
External Relationships: it is still important to maintain strong relationship with
customers and other partners in this stage.

Diffusion:
In this diffusion stage, the organizations will accept the leakage of knowledge, and no
longer try to keep the knowledge under wraps. They will spread out the knowledge by
selling it to outsiders. Again, the managers should consider following approaches in
this stage:

Informal Knowledge Systems: knowledge in this stage will be disseminated widely

and quickly, which requires a system that focuses on training employees and
encourage their use.
Information Technology Systems: an extensive knowledge database will be useful for
the organization during this stage. The competitive advantages will stem from the
ease of access to information.
Human Resources: customer consultants will be needed in this stage, so that they
can work with customers and recognize the value of applying the knowledge to
customersâ problems.
External Relationship: organizations should focus on building strong customers
relationship by their services, and using their brand to create the differences with
other competitors.

Commoditization:
The organizations concentrate on managing knowledge that is already well known.
The basic knowledge has been completely diffused. However, there are many
opportunities to extract value from current knowledge to generate one in this stage.
The approached to extract value as follow:

Informal Knowledge Systems: in this stage, the use of formal knowledge systems will
be more valuable than the informal one. The systems will help the organization to
supply the best practices that can add value to well developed processes, and
encourage new ways of commercializing existing knowledge.
Information Technology Systems: organizations should develop effective search
engines and retrieval systems because of the significant volume of documents that
have gathered overtime.
Human Resources: it is similar to the requirements of the diffusion stage. However,
the demand for the knowledge may decline the demand for the jobs will be reduced.
It is better to use the contract employees to solve this problem.

CONCLUSION

Base on my research, knowledge is much different from data and information. It is

how people use data to crate valuable information and from less valuable
information to more valuable one. In other words, knowledge in an area can be
defined as justified true belief about relationships among concepts relevant to that
particular area.
Every organization needs to implement effectively its knowledge management
processes due to four important drivers. By doing so, it will bring many benefits to
the business as well as the individual employees.
The organizations need to understand the knowledge life cycle in order to manage
the knowledge. The cycle comprises four stages, which are creation, mobilization,
diffusion, and commoditization, points out the essential skill needs to effectively
implement knowledge management process.