Professor Question: The Role of Knowledge Management & Knowledge Management Syst

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Professor Question: The Role of Knowledge Management & Knowledge Management Systems (PLEASE READ)

Class, what are your thoughts on any aspect of the “Professor Analysis” issue below. Do you agree or disagree, why or not? What do you find most interesting about this issue?

Can you provide any real world example of any of these issues?

How about the specific issues of: “Knowledge as a firm asset” ,”Knowledge has different forms” “Knowledge has a location”, “Knowledge is situational” discuss.

Feel free to share any article, journal, website information or other resource that is related to any of these subtopics.

NOTE: Please base your answers upon research and reading from the course textbook, outside articles (please feel free to state page #s referenced to extend the learning for others in the class), other “official academic sources”, and your professional experience.

Professor Analysis: The Role of Knowledge Management and Knowledge Management Systems (PLEASE READ)

What is the role of knowledge management and knowledge management programs in business?

Define knowledge management and explain its value to businesses.

Knowledge management is the set of processes developed in an organization to create, gather, store, maintain, transfer, apply, and disseminate the firms knowledge. Knowledge management promotes organizational learning and incorporates knowledge into its business processes and decision making. As the textbook points out, knowledge management enables the organization to learn from its environment and incorporate this new knowledge into its business processes. Knowledge management helps firms do things more effectively and efficiently, and cannot be easily duplicated by other organizations. This “in-house” knowledge is a very valuable asset and is a major source of profit and competitive advantage

Describe the important dimensions of knowledge.

Table 11-1 describes the important dimensions of knowledge:

Knowledge is a firm asset: an intangible asset; requires organizational resources; experiences network effects as its value increases as more people share it.

Knowledge has different forms: can be either tacit or explicit; involves know-how, craft, and skill; involves knowing how to follow procedures; involves knowing why, not simply when, things happen.

Knowledge has a location: it’s a cognitive event involving mental models and maps of individuals; has both a social and an individual basis of knowledge; is “sticky, situated, and contextual.

Knowledge is situational: it’s conditional; it’s related to context.

Distinguish between data, knowledge, and wisdom and between tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge.

Data by itself has no meaning but is the first step in the creation of knowledge. Knowledge includes concepts, experience, and insight that provide a framework for creating, evaluating, and using information. Wisdom is the collective and individual experience of applying knowledge to the solution of problems. Explicit knowledge is knowledge that has been documented whereas tacit knowledge is the expertise and experience of organizational members that has not been formally documented

Describe the stages in the knowledge management value chain.

Refer to Figure 11–2 for the knowledge management value chain. These steps include:

Acquire: knowledge discovery, data mining, neural networks, genetic algorithms, knowledge workstations, expert knowledge networks

Store: document management systems, knowledge databases, expert systems

Disseminate: intranet portals, push email reports, search engines, collaboration

Apply: decision support systems, enterprise applications

Explanation / Answer

Agree with the statements. Ellaborate your own thoughts with below points added:

Knowledge Management includes structured and unstructured data.

With the fast-paced technology enhancements in data warehousing, neural networks, business intelligence, the knowledge management scenario in thew organizations is highly promising in 2017.

The successful organizations are looking much beyond intranet, shared folders, and discussion forums. The organizations are looking at making use of Data Warehouse Technology in Knowledge Management.

Knowledge gets its data from the organization's, machines and people. This data comes in many forms. It is databases, multiple application systems used in the organization's, digital books, discussions, world-wide-web, knowledge from the individual experts.These heterogeneous sources of the information as and when needed by the organizations, decision makers, managers, planners and business owners.

With cloud computing the data from various locations can be joined as well and even for small organizations, the knowledge management has become cost-effective.

More data has been created in last 2 years than the many more earlier years That makes knowledge management in 2017 to leverage on the data warehouse technology.

Wise inferences can be based by knowledge management systems using the huge resources available.

In the medical field past data and patterns are used to check effectiveness of certain drugs and support or discontinue the current practices.

As now it is possible to take the heterogeneous data and apply it to the given problem, before implementing any new strategies, the huge data in the data warehouse can be used to check whether the technology supports the decision or not.

Inferences can be based on the analytical queries run on the heterogeneous data.

When planning large events like marathons, exhibitions, based on the past data including the information collected in the discussions can be useful to make the next events better.

In the education system, class notes, audio-visuals, earlier solutions, etc can be used to build build better e-learning tools.

For business organizations, which products are profitable, which salesman should be promoted, what manufacturing processes yield better results, which vendors supply the inventory on time and at good price, targeted marketing etc and many more analysis can be done. Multiple parameters can be used and various sources of data can be used to come to the conclusion.

This combined with agile principles can yield results in a cost-efficient way. In the agile methodology, the iterative process is used to deliver the results. The regular business benefits are demonstrated and the knowledge management is aligned with the organization's goals.

For natural disasters, it is needed to make fast and accurate decisions. With huge amount of geographical data available, with feeds from Satellites in space and sensors on Earth about the current scenario, with databases of historical events, analytics can be applied to prevent the natural disasters and to mitigate the risks in case of the events.

Real world examples:

http://realkm.com/2016/08/25/case-study-km-construction-industry-socio-technical-platform/

https://www.questia.com/library/journal/1P3-4045099881/case-study-impact-of-knowledge-management-on-organizational

https://www.ukessays.com/essays/information-technology/case-study-of-shell-livelink-information-technology-essay.php

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