Introduction to knowledge management

 Knowledge management (KM) is the process of creating,

sharing, using and managing the knowledge and information
of an organisation. It refers to a multidisciplinary approach to
achieve organisational objectives by making the best use of
knowledge.
 enhance the impact of knowledge on the unit’s goal
achievement.
 (KM) is highly related to the concept of intellectual capital
(both human and structural).
 How important?

 Consider these statistics:

 It’s estimated that poor knowledge-sharing practices cost
Fortune 500 companies $31.5 billion annually.
 74 percent of organizations estimate that effective knowledge
management disciplines increase company productivity by 10-
40 percent.

We live in a knowledge economy, making knowledge

one of the modern company’s most important
assets.

Lecture part 1-Introduction to Knowledge management 2

 Important dimensions of knowledge

• Knowledge is a firm asset

• Intangible
• Creation of knowledge from data, information, requires
organizational resources
• As it is shared, experiences network effects
• Knowledge has different forms
• May be explicit (documented) or tacit (residing in minds)
• Know-how, craft, skill
• How to follow procedure
• Knowing why things happen (causality)
Important dimensions of knowledge (cont.)

• Knowledge has a location

• Cognitive event
• Both social and individual
• “Sticky” (hard to move), situated (enmeshed in firm’s culture),
contextual (works only in certain situations)

• Knowledge is situational
• Conditional: Knowing when to apply procedure
• Contextual: Knowing circumstances to use certain tool
• Organizational learning
• Process in which organizations learn
• Gain experience through collection of data,
measurement, trial and error, and feedback
• Adjust behavior to reflect experience
 Create new business processes
 Change patterns of management decision making
The 6 key benefits of knowledge management in
an organization

1. Spend less time recreating existing knowledge. 

2. Get the information you need sooner (and with
fewer headaches).
3. Make fewer mistakes.
4. Make informed decisions.
5. Standardize processes.
6. Provide better service to employees and
customers. 
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Knowledge Management Value Chain Model
 Knowledge Management System
A Knowledge Management System is an application designed to capture all the
information within your organization and make it easily available to your employees,
anywhere, anytime. In other words, a KMS is a knowledge repository
software system. Most KMS provide an "information hub" where content can be created,
organized and redistributed through search tools and other features that let users find
answers quickly.
Some of the tangible benefits of using KMS include:
Improved distribution of knowledge - Knowledge that previously resided with
one individual is now made available on-demand for the rest of your
organization.
Greater information accuracy and consistency - When everyone in an
organization can access and contribute to a comprehensive internal knowledge
base, the quality of information improves.
Increased employee satisfaction - Knowledge workers want to share their
knowledge and be recognized for it.
Faster on-boarding of new employees - New employees have a wealth of
information at their fingertips to immediately start finding answers to the many
questions they have.
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• Three major types of knowledge management
systems:

• Enterprise-wide knowledge management systems

• General-purpose firm-wide efforts to collect, store, distribute, and
apply digital content and knowledge
• Knowledge work systems (KWS)
• Specialized systems built for engineers, scientists, other knowledge
workers charged with discovering and creating new knowledge
• Intelligent techniques
• Diverse group of techniques such as data mining used for various
goals: discovering knowledge, distilling knowledge, discovering
optimal solutions
• Three major types of knowledge in enterprise
• Structured documents
• Reports, presentations
• Formal rules
• Semi structured documents
• E-mails, videos
• Unstructured, tacit knowledge
• 80% of an organization’s business content is semistructured or
unstructured
• Enterprise-wide content management systems
• Help capture, store, retrieve, distribute, preserve
• Documents, reports, best practices
• Semistructured knowledge (e-mails)
• Bring in external sources
• News feeds, research
• Tools for communication and collaboration
• Knowledge network systems
• Provide online directory of corporate experts in well-defined
knowledge domains
• Use communication technologies to make it easy for employees
to find appropriate expert in a company
• May systematize solutions developed by experts and store them
in knowledge database
• Best-practices
• Frequently asked questions (FAQ) repository
• Knowledge work systems
• Systems for knowledge workers to help create new knowledge
and ensure that knowledge is properly integrated into business
• Knowledge workers
• Researchers, designers, architects, scientists, and engineers
who create knowledge and information for the organization
• Three key roles:
• Keeping organization current in knowledge
• Serving as internal consultants regarding their areas of expertise
• Acting as change agents, evaluating, initiating, and promoting
change projects
 Supporting technologies of KM

 Artificial Intelligence
 Intelligent agents
 Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD)
 Data mining
 Model warehouses & model marts
 Extensible Markup Language (XML)

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 Artificial intelligence
 Scanning e-mail, databases and documents
helping establishing knowledge profiles
 Forecasting future results using existing
knowledge
 Determining meaningful relationships in
knowledge
 Providing natural language or voice
command-driven user interface for a KM
system

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 Knowledge Discovery in Databases
(KDD)

 Is a process used to search for and extract useful

information from volumes of documents and data.
It includes tasks such as:
 information harvesting
 knowledge extraction
 data archaeology
 data exploration
 data pattern processing
 data dredging

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 Data mining

 The process of searching for previously unknown

information or relationships in large databases, is
ideal for extracting knowledge from databases,
documents, e-mail, etc.
 For example technical analysis of stocks and stock
markets can be done by using data mining

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 Model warehouses & model marts (1/2)

 Extend the role of data mining and knowledge discovery by

acting as repositories of knowledge created from prior
knowledge-discovery operations.
 One can build rules for this kind of operations

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 Model warehouses & model marts (2/2)

Decision model about travel expenses

A=First Class hotel B=Second Class hotel C=Third class hotel

This knowledge can be in use when the hotel rooms are booked
for different kind of staff as well as when travel expense
reports are processed.

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