Knowledge Management (KM) - Page 1 of 2

- 'knowing what you know and profiting from it'       

Knowledge Management, or simply "KM", is a business concept that deals with how a company should and could make the best use of its existing knowledge.  It involves the systematic and structured process of organizing corporate information for easy retrieval, distribution, and reuse across the entire company.  By this definition alone, computerization should be part of every serious KM program, which is why KM-related software have been on the rise in recent years.

Experts believe that the vast wealth of knowledge that an organization accumulates over years - business ideas, management concepts, internal systems and processes, engineering expertise, customer and prospect information, industry trends, and the like - are often very underutilized. In fact, millions of pieces of vital knowledge within the company are just localized to a certain group within the organization, or even just a certain individual. These information only stay with the people who keep them, and will be lost as soon as these people leave the company.

With excellent knowledge management, every piece of corporate information becomes readily available to anybody within the company who could use them for the company's benefit.  Empowering people to seamlessly share past or present knowledge, or even their skills, with each other and harness them to meet company goals is the essence of knowledge management. The importance of knowledge management is embodied in the now-famous statement of former Hewlett-Packard CEO Lew Platt: "If HP knew what it knows, we'd be three times as profitable." 

In the last century, manual labor or production management is the key to success.  In the 21st century, it would be knowledge management.  In fact, knowledge management directly impacts the major drivers of company success: customer value, operational excellence, and product innovation.  Pursuing these efficiently and effectively requires excellent management of knowledge to ensure progressive productivity among knowledge workers and proper harnessing of the organization's collective knowledge to its advantage.

Knowledge Management has three (3) major components: 1) people, who keep the knowledge and apply them; 2) processes, with which people create, capture, store, organize, and distribute knowledge; and 3) information, which are the pieces of facts and data that people convert into and apply as knowledge.  It is therefore imperative that these three components are considered when setting up a KM program.

<Proceed to Page 2>