Ingles 3

KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT: WHY DO WE NEED IT FOR
CORPORATES

Knowledge Management (KM) is the process of gathering, managing and sharing employees' knowledge capital throughout the organisation. Knowledge sharing throughout the organisation enhances existing organisational business processes, introduces more efficient and effective business processes and removes redundant processes. It is adiscipline that promotes a collaborative and integrated approach to the creation, capture, organisation access and use of an enterprise's knowledge assets. KM has now become a mainstream priority for companies of all sizes. Capturing a company's most valuable Knowledge (asset) and distributing it effectively across the enterprise is a business critical issue for many help desk, customer support and ITdepartments.

The systematic process of finding, selecting, organising, distilling and presenting information, improves an employee’s comprehension in a specific area of interest. KM, as emphasized by Abdul Kalam (2004), helps an organisation to gain insight and understanding from its own experience. Specific knowledge management activities help focus on organisation on acquiring, storing andutilizing knowledge for problem solving, dynamic leaning, strategic planning and decision making. It also prevents intellectual assets from decay, adds to firm intelligence and provides increased flexibility.

KM is not only about Knowledge Technology. KM must be an enabler to achieve strategic business objectives. The organisational debris from failed attempts to impose new technical infrastructuresthat are either inappropriate to their work environments, or where people are not willing to share knowledge is ample evidence. Hence the need of Knowledge Management initiative arises to become solution for such problems, which brings together people, process and technology and helps corporate to achieve its goals and vision.

Knowledge management is an audit of "intellectual assets" thathighlights unique sources, critical functions and potential bottlenecks, which hinder knowledge flows to the point of use. It protects intellectual assets from decay, seeks opportunities to enhance decisions, services and products through adding intelligence, increasing value and providing flexibility. KM complements and enhances other organisational initiatives such as total quality management (TQM),business process re-engineering (BPR) and organisational learning, providing a new and urgent focus to sustain competitive position.

The Gartner Group (2005) defines KM as a discipline that promotes an integrated approach to identifying managing and sharing of all of an enterprise’s information assets. These information assets may include database documents, policies procedures as well aspreviously unarticulated expertise and experience resident in individual workers. Knowledge management issues include developing, implementing and maintaining the appropriate technical and organizational infrastructure to enable knowledge sharing.

Broadbent (1997) defines KM as ‘a form of expertise management which draws out tacit knowledge, making it accessible for specific purposes to improve theperformance of organisation; about how the organisation’s ‘know-how’ should be structured, organised, located and utilized to provide the most effective action at that point in time’.

WHY DO WE NEED KM FOR CORPORATES
Knowledge management solutions are now the most important strategic technologies for large companies, according to a new report and survey of European executives by the EconomistIntelligence Unit (EIU.com, 2003), sponsored by Tata Consultancy Services. In the survey, 67% of companies cite knowledge management/business intelligence solutions as important to achieving their strategic goals over the next three years.

To serve customers well and remain in business companies must: reduce their cycle times, operate with minimum fixed assets and overhead (people, inventory and...