Knowledge extractprocess kms

Knowledge Extract Process in Knowledge Management System
Guillermo Matos Morales1, Ricardo Chalmeta Rosaleñ 2
1Departamento de Computación, Universidad de Oriente, Santiago de Cuba, Cuba
2Departamento de Lenguajes y Sistemas Informáticos, Universidad Jaume I, Castellón, España

gmatos@csd.uo.edu.cu
rchalmet@lsi.uji.es

Key Words: Methodology, Knowledge Management System, Knowledge AuditAbstract: Knowledge audit of employees is a fundamental issue inside the process of knowledge management. The most common form to extract the knowledge of employees is by carrying out a survey in order to find available knowledge, for instance, the experts in each area and the best accumulated practices in the organization. The paper proposes a knowledge audit system, which relies on thecreation and application of a survey.

1. Introduction
The necessity to establish Knowledge Management (KM) in organizations becomes more and more a challenge that the enterprises must face to be able to survive in a world that is more and more globalized where knowledge constitutes the main asset to achieve the biggest profitability and efficiency, obtaining products and services of the best qualitythat enables them to compete for the control of markets.

It is not the knowledge itself that has been erected into the differentiating factor of the organizations´ competitiveness, but its circulation, the capability of the systems to generalize their access up to almost universal limits together with the capability to identify it, value it and systematize it in such a way that it becomes adifferentiating and superiority element.

It is in this context, where the extraction of the employees´ knowledge, as an essential part of the intellectual capital that the organizations possess, becomes a fundamental task within the knowledge Management process and this is precisely the subject of the present work.

2. Literature Review
Among the many definitions of KM we find the one given bythe Gartner Group (Eyler 2001) which describes the main tasks that should be achieved and states that: "Knowledge management is a discipline that promotes an integrated approach to the creation, capture, organization, access, and use of an enterprise's information assets. These assets include structured databases, textual information such as policy and procedure documents, and most importantly,the tacit knowledge and expertise resident in the heads of individual employees."

The term 'Knowledge Management' (KM) has not yet been fully explored and there is still room for significant improvement as regards to both its theoretical aspects and its practical applicability (McInerney & Day, 2002). Thus, a key factor for achieving correct knowledge management in an organisation is thedevelopment and implementation of a Knowledge Management System (KMS), that is to say, a technological system that allows knowledge to be created, coded, stored and distributed within the organisation (Day, 2001). Other definitions are:

A knowledge management (computer) system is a specialised system, supported by information and communication technologies, that interacts with the organisation'ssystems to facilitate all aspects of knowledge management (Abdullah et al., 2002).

The combination of enterprise strategies, businessprocesses and information technology for capturing, organizing, storing and disseminating knowledge and experiences of individual workers and groups in an extended-enterprise environment (Nielsen & Michailova, 2005).

A knowledge management system (KMS) is an ICTsystem in the sense of an application system or an ICT platform that combines and integrates functions for the contextualized handling of both, explicit and tacit knowledge, throughout the organization or that part of the organization that is targeted by a KM initiative (Maier, 2007).

The benefits of Knowledge Management Systems are well described in a great number of papers (Liao, 2003). They...