Organizations primarily compete on the
basis of knowledge and information.
Knowledge not only of their own circumstances but also that of the environment, governmental agencies, competition,
customers and anything else that might
help the business grow.
According to Dr. Tom Froehlich, Professor and Director of Information Architecture and Knowledge Management at
Kent State University, “Business owners
and managers need to understand the discipline of knowledge management and
why it’s important to have employees with
this skill set. It is an area of expertise that
allows mid-career professionals to contribute to an organization in a lasting way.”
Smart Business talked with Dr.
Froehlich for more information on knowledge management and why it’s important.
What is knowledge management?
It represents a range of activities that
include the identification, organization,
creation, representation, distribution, use
and reuse of knowledge in an enterprise so
as to increase a business’s efficiency, effectiveness, innovativeness and competitiveness. This knowledge includes explicit
information as recorded in electronic or
paper form and tacit knowledge, such as
the expertise, creativity and the proficiency of the organization’s employees. It aims
to identify gaps and needs. These knowledge activities are enacted as an integral
part of management, policy and practice at
every level of the enterprise.
What this typically means is identifying,
organizing and making readily available the
intellectual assets of an organization. Best
practices are identified and disseminated.
Expertise is easily located and shared.
New knowledge, particularly for competitive advantage, can be generated. Corporate data is accessible and tacit knowledge, such as a customer’s preferences,
can be made explicit and shared.
What are the key identifiable themes included in knowledge management?
The key themes are: capture of employee
know-how; innovation incubation; enterprise content management; competitive
intelligence; knowledge sharing; organizational expertise management; organizational learning; virtual collaboration; digital
asset management; digital rights management; document, records and email management; and communities of practice. A
community of practice refers to a group
with a common concern for some topic or
problem collaborating to create innovations and solutions and to share ideas.
Such a group could be internal to a specific company, such as members of the marketing department sharing ideas about
product awareness, or across different
enterprises, such as car salesmen discussing the best selling techniques.
The focus is on people. Technology can
be facilitative, but it is a management of
people and their activities that will make
the organization efficient and effective.
Why do businesses need knowledge management?
Informal knowledge, such as employees’
know-how, is lost with employee reductions, turnover or retirement. It must be
replaced with formal knowledge that
allows for easy management of the intellectual assets of an organization. Businesses must increase their rate of innovation
and shorten product development cycles
because of global competition. There is a
need to manage complexity, not only the
internal demands of the organization, but
in its ability to cope with governmental
requirements at all levels and other environmental changes. There is also the need to capitalize on what an organization collectively knows.
How is knowledge management different
than the business management taught in
graduate schools of business?
It takes a comprehensive approach to the
knowledge and information assets of an
organization. It includes intellectual capital
as part of an organization’s assets and part
of its balance sheet. It recognizes that the
marketplace has become global, increasing
competition and leading to better quality
and more efficient means of production.
What are the disciplines involved in effective
knowledge management?
Another area where education in knowledge management differs from business
school curricula is the disciplines and subjects involved. In addition to such typical
business curricula topics as decision support systems or change management,
areas of concern for knowledge management include: cognitive science (for how
employees acquire and process information); library and information science
(knowledge organization, indexing and
access); information storage and retrieval
systems; technical writing; effective communication and consensus-building among
stakeholders; document engineering (creation, access, storage, retrieval, archiving,
elimination); enterprise content management; email management; and semantic
networks (use of metadata and hierarchies
to structure the relationships among ideas
and content), to name a few.
What else can be said about knowledge management?
Developments in total quality management, benchmarking, best practices, strategic planning and organizational learning all
have some relationship to knowledge management.
Knowledge management includes not
only value-added information and information for decision-making, but it also fosters
knowledge creation and sharing. For more
information, visit http://iakm.kent.edu.
DR. THOMAS J. FROEHLICH is Professor and Director
of Information Architecture and Knowledge Management
at Kent State University. Reach him at (330) 672-5840 or
[email protected].
