Human Resource

Information Systems

Prof. Shubhamoy Dey

Knowledge Management

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 Topics

 Knowledge and its types

 KM Activities
 Approaches to KM
 Implementation issues
 IT in KM

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 Knowledge management

Is it a business process OR
Technology?

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 Knowledge Management
Knowledge management (KM) is a

→Is process
→To identify, select, organize, disseminate,
and transfer important information and
expertise
→ Part of the organization’s memory (OM).

It helps in
⚫ Organization Learning
⚫ Planning & Decision Making
⚫ Sharing of Knowledge
⚫ Reuse of Knowledge

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 Knowledge
What is business knowledge?

Business Knowledge is

 Highly actionable or dynamic

 A Business value creator
 Is generally discovered
 May give strategic advantage
 Corporate asset

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 Knowledge – Corporate Asset
How it differs from other assets?

 Not consumed, but consumers can add to it thus

increasing its value.
 Need to be updated regularly
 It is more intangible and has Uncertain value →
difficult to estimate the impact of knowledge.

Intellectual capital or intellectual asset

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Knowledge Types – Explicit knowledge
Explicit knowledge → LEAKY KNOWLEDGE

Codified (documented)
Can be distributed to others
Can be transformed into a process or strategy
Deals with objective, rational and technical knowledge

Examples: Data, policies, procedures,

Software (business logic), Documents,
Products, Strategies, Goals, Missions
and Core Competencies

The more knowledge is made explicit, the more

economically it can be transferred
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 Knowledge – Tacit knowledge
Tacit knowledge → Sticky / Embedded Knowledge
Subjective, cognitive, and experiential learning;
Personal
Resides in the brain
Embedded in group interactions

 Examples: Corporate experiences, learning, Mental

maps, Insights, Acumen, Expertise, Know-how,
Trade secrets, Organization culture

Tacit knowledge is generally slow and costly to

transfer and can be plagued by ambiguity.

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 Knowledge → KMS
Goal: for an organization to be aware of individual and
collective knowledge so that it may make the most effective
use of the knowledge it has.
Integrate both explicit and tacit knowledge into → KMS

 KM Process: 6 Steps
1. Create knowledge.
2. Capture knowledge.
3. Refine knowledge.
4. Store knowledge.
5. Manage knowledge.
6. Disseminate knowledge.

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Knowledge Management Initiatives

⚫ to make knowledge visible

⚫ to develop a knowledge-intensive culture,
⚫ to build a knowledge infrastructure

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 Knowledge Management Continued

 Knowledge creation or knowledge acquisition is the

generation of new insights, ideas, or routines.

⚫ Socialization mode tacit → New tacit through social

interactions and shared experience.
⚫ Combination mode refers to the creation of new explicit
knowledge by merging, categorizing, reclassifying, and
synthesizing existing explicit knowledge
⚫ Externalization Tacit to New Explicit
⚫ Internalization Explicit to New Tacit
 Knowledge sharing
 Knowledge seeking

Activities or Processes
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Knowledge Management Approaches
There are two fundamental approaches to knowledge
management: a process and a practice approach.
Two are not mutually exclusive : Both can be used

 The process approach

→ codify organizational knowledge
→ through formalized controls, processes, and use of IT
→ to enhance the quality and speed of knowledge
creation and distribution.

 These technologies include:

⚫ Intranets; data warehousing; knowledge repositories;
decision support tools & groupware

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 Knowledge Management Approaches Continued
 The practice approach
→ assumes that organizational knowledge is tacit in nature

→ formal controls, processes, and technologies are not suitable for

transmitting this type of understanding.
→ No building of formal systems to manage knowledge
→ Builds social environments or communities to facilitate the
sharing of tacit understanding → CONNECT PEOPLE
→ typically adopted by companies that provide highly customized
solutions to unique problems. The valuable knowledge for these
firms is tacit in nature, which is difficult to express, capture, and
manage.

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 Knowledge Management – IT
KM is more than a technology or product,
It is a methodology applied to business practices.
IT is crucial for KM Success
 Components of Knowledge Management Systems:

⚫ Communication technologies allow users to access

needed knowledge and to communicate with each
other.

⚫ Collaboration technologies provide the means to

perform group work.

⚫ Storage and retrieval technologies (database

management systems) to store and manage
knowledge.

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Knowledge Management – Supporting Technologies

 Extensible Markup Language (XML)

→ enables standardized representations of data
structures, so that data can be processed
appropriately by heterogeneous systems without
case-by-case programming.
 Artificial Intelligence (AI methods: expert systems,
neural networks, fuzzy logic, genetic algorithms, etc.)
 Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD) is a
process used to search for and extract useful
information from volumes of data.
 Text Retrieval and Text Mining
 Text Summarization

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Knowledge Management – IT Products
Technology tools that support knowledge management are called
knowledgeWare.

 Most knowledge management software packages include

one or more of the following tools:

⚫ collaborative computing tools

⚫ knowledge servers
⚫ enterprise knowledge portals
⚫ electronic document management systems
⚫ knowledge harvesting tools
⚫ search engines
⚫ knowledge management suites.

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 MANAGERIAL ISSUES
 Need for Organizational culture change → Contribute,
use and value, Reward structure
 How to capture tacit knowledge. When knowledgeable
people Leave
 How to measure the tangible and intangible benefits of
KMS.
 Determining the roles of the various personnel in a KM
effort.
 The lasting importance of knowledge management.
 Implementation in the face of quickly changing
technology.

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