It is a greater term devised to oversee the Knowledge systems of an organization and being able to retrieve the information from the repositories, and its implications on the entire knowledge based systems. The management of Knowledge is becoming more and more mission critical as more and more knowledge variables are added to the mix. Some of the few areas but not limited to these that comes under this greater term are; content management, data mining, Information management and some of the systems that engineer Knowledge management are content integration, content delivery, corporate portals, intra nets, internet, search engines, secure content management and storage management. The entire phenomenon of Knowledge management is becoming as important to the countries as to the organizations as the world is drawing more and more towards globalism and a knowledge based society. The threats of the 21st century like global terrorism and pandemics to name a few are adding fuel to the fire. The development of the enterprise solutions like SAP, Oracle, MS CRM are the outcomes of the organization's need to have a stable and reliable knowledge management systems. The development of the color coded security system (dependent on credible information) devised by the department of Homeland Security to ensure security are few examples of the need for the efficient knowledge management systems.
The primary information management concern in the enterprise today is to ensure that the knowledge necessary to drive critical business processes is available where it needs to be, when it needs to be. The costs of failure to do this are high. A recent study of 80 large organizations by Infonetics Research found that overall downtime costs averaged an astounding 3.6% of annual revenue!
In another study, Forrester estimated the average cost of downtime for e-commerce sites at $8,000 per hour -- at larger sites like eBay, Intel and Amazon, the costs soar to hundreds of thousands of dollars per hour.
Knowledge management is not confined only to the system facilitation or an engine to draw revenues rather it is a paradigm that compares the old and the modern management paradigms draws parallels and perpendiculars between them which has led to the inception of different KM models which are emerging and evolving as any other technology, theory and praxis.
Although there are different schools of thought for KM there is one by Peters which came out in 1992 can be revisited simply because of the rapid advancement in IT compared to the time of it's inception; the school of thought states " The crux of the issue is not information, information technology... the answer turns out to lie more with psychology and marketing of knowledge within the family than with bits and bytes". I completely agree with the fact that the crux of the issue does lie beyond the realm of Information technology however the importance of IT cannot be undermined. Besides even if we have all the knowledge and Information in the world but do not have the vehicle to transport this information will not do us much good.
5 comments:
hey man .. nice to know you're getting into it with a start on Knowledge management .. check your email though .. sent you something you will need .. for reference or otherwise :)
Ola Monsiour,
Good stuff well written.
The content of this article is a collection of statements and claims about something called "knowledge management" that appear to be aimed at making a sales pitch. The choice of words seems to trying to press all kinds of buttons leading up to an invitation to buy something, but the writer does not know what his/her audience wants and so is pressing buttons at random.
The last paragraph is the most interesting. It warns me that KM is not about IT, which is a good point. I am not sure what "family" means in this context. (If the author had cited the article or linked to it, I would be able to check that out.)
I was hoping to learn about what the "management" of knowledge is about. Surely there must be different views out there about what makes up knowledge and descriptions of how it is identified or created or preserved or extended and what is knowledge really about. (The term "information" is used but the difference between it and "knowledge" is not explained.)
Well written overall but I think the article lacks proper referencing. The author mentioned about "inception of different KM models", but in my ordinary opinion, it would've been more helpful to understand the concept of KM if he explained one or two of those models.
I appreciate you all taking your precious time to critique the article. Rest assured these invaluable insights will be taken into account for the next article, thanks again for all your feedback.
Post a Comment