Terms Associated with Knowledge Management

Knowledge economy: An economy where knowledge is a critical factor of production. This concept was introduced by Peter Drucker in the 1950’s.

Knowledge workers: A position in an organization that focuses on the promotion, creation and facilitation of knowledge in order to better meet the organisation’s mission, goals and objectives.

Information management: The management of facts and other data, as opposed to knowledge management, which is the broader term, including information, but also beliefs, perspectives, judgments, methodologies etc.

Knowledge assets: Assets such as knowledge about markets, products, technology which enable the organization to make a profit.

Intellectual property: IP refers to creations of the mind: inventions, literary and artistic works, and symbols, names, images, and designs used in commerce. Examples include patents, trademarks, Industrial designs, geographical indications, copyright.

Intellectual capital: All the knowledge, information and intellectual property which could be put to use in order to create wealth.

Ontology: In Information Technology, ontology formally represents knowledge as a set of concepts within a domain, and the relationships between pairs of concepts.

Taxonomy: It is one of those words that most people never hear or use. Basically, taxonomy is a way to group things together. Originating from Greek, taxonomy origanally refers to the academic discipline of defining groups of biological organisms on the basis of shared characteristics and giving names to those groups. Applied to knowledge management, taxonomy would mean a group of concepts with shared characteristics.

Explicit, Implicit and Tacit Knowledge: In the KM literature, knowledge is most commonly categorized as either explicit or tacit (that which is in people's heads). This characterization is however rather too simple, but a more important point, and a criticism, is that it is misleading.

A much more nuanced and useful characterization is to describe knowledge as explicit, implicit, and tacit.

Explicit: information or knowledge that is set out in tangible form.

Implicit: information or knowledge that is not set out in tangible form but could be made explicit.

Tacit: information or knowledge that one would have extreme difficulty operationally setting out in tangible form.

The classic example in the KM literature of true "tacit" knowledge is Nonaka and Takeuchi's example of the kinesthetic knowledge that was necessary to design and engineer a home bread maker, knowledge that could only be gained or transferred by having engineers work alongside bread makers and learn the motions and the "feel" necessary to knead bread dough (Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995).

To better understand knowledge management, Liebowitz (1999) named the following aspects as the foundation of a knowledge management system:

• Organisations must create a knowledge sharing environment. Some do it by providing incentives, others by building it into the performance review. A study of 150 companies shod that people are not very reluctant to share knowledge, but rather reluctant to use other people’s knowledge, because they cannot put their personal stamp on it.
• Top management needs to be committed and put high value on knowledge sharing. Some methodologies to do this will be discussed in this module.
• It is important to distinguish between knowledge management and information management – they are not the same. Knowledge is information with a process applied to it so that it becomes wisdom or expertise. So the IT process of storing information may be one aspect of knowledge management, but cannot by itself be seen as creating wisdom/expertise. The graph below explains this:
• Knowledge management is not something that can be done on the side-line; it needs to be integrated in the mainstream of organisation.

The value of Knowledge Management relates directly to the effectiveness with which the managed knowledge enables the members of the organization to deal with today's situations and effectively envision and create their future. Without on-demand access to managed knowledge, every situation is addressed based on what the individual or group brings to the situation with them. With on-demand access to managed knowledge, every situation is addressed with the sum total of everything anyone in the organization has ever learned about a situation of a similar nature. Which approach would you perceive would make a more effective organization?