Knowledge Management caters to the critical issues of organizational adaption, survival and competence in face of increasingly discontinuous environmental change. Essentially, it embodies organizational processes that seek synergistic combination of data and information processing capacity of information technologies, and the creative and innovative capacity of human beings.

The working definition: Corporate strategies employed to foster innovation, knowledge transfer, improved business process, and enhanced learning. An environment where knowledge creation, sharing, and reuse are explicitly valued, expected, supported, and rewarded.

KM is viewed from a two-dimensional perspective. The first dimension consists of the activities that are critical to knowledge creation and innovation: knowledge exchange, knowledge capture, knowledge reuse, and knowledge internalization. Collectively, these processes build a learning organization -- one skilled at creating, acquiring, and transferring knowledge as well as adapting its actions to reflect new insight and innovation.

• Marketplaces are increasingly competitive and the rate of innovation is rising.
• Reductions in staffing create a need to replace informal knowledge with formal methods.
• Competitive pressures reduce the size of the work force that holds valuable business knowledge.
• The amount of time available to experience and acquire knowledge has diminished.
• Early retirements and increasing mobility of the work force lead to loss of knowledge.
• There is a need to manage increasing complexity as small operating companies are trans-national sourcing operations.
• Changes in strategic direction may result in the loss of knowledge in a specific area.
• Most of our work is information based.
• Organizations compete on the basis of knowledge.
• Products and services are increasingly complex, endowing them with a significant information component.
• The need for life-long learning is an inescapable reality.

In brief, knowledge and information have become the medium in which business problems occur. As a result, managing knowledge represents the primary opportunity for achieving substantial savings, significant improvements in human performance, and competitive advantage.

It’s not just a Fortune 500 business problem. Small companies need formal approaches to knowledge management even more, because they don’t have the market leverage, inertia, and resources that big companies do. They have to be much more flexible, more responsive, and more "right" (make better decisions) — because even small mistakes can be fatal to them.

Top management increasingly committing to knowledge management as a strategic process, more and more companies are moving from evaluation to planning, piloting and production of KM applications.

Organizations want the ability to mine knowledge sources, which include such features as a central search facility and improved searching and indexing, content analysis and automatic categorization capabilities, improved data analysis and personalization functions. These features are inherent in the concept of the corporate portal, the single point of access across the applications, repositories, processes and functions that have proliferated in the enterprise information environment.

The Human Side
Technology is not the ultimate answer to achieving an effective knowledge-sharing work environment. KM tools and supporting technologies, such as GroupWare, search/retrieval engines and data warehousing, are only part of the solution. No, the gist of KM has to do with human factors, including behavioral, organizational and cultural aspects, according to Marianne Hedin, research manager for International Data Corp.'s Consulting Services Research Program. For example, it is impossible for an organization to achieve the full benefits of KM if its structural rigidity restricts information and knowledge flow, or if its employees are unwilling to share their knowledge. The importance of these "soft" issues has fueled a rapidly growing new business for the services industry, specifically, the consulting firms that help clients implement KM programs.
Because KM is as much about culture, organizational or behavioral change as technology, consulting firms take a broad view of KM. They tend to tackle five areas in an organization: strategy, process, people/organization, content and technology. These five areas are interdependent; it is nearly impossible to change one factor without affecting another.

Sharing Community-Based Knowledge Through Virtual Workspaces
Many tools designed to support electronic collaboration fall short because they don't provide a flexible enough environment for diverse groups of people working together.
"In a typical organization, 80 percent of the documents are sitting on individuals' hard drives," says Patricia Peper, Xerox DocuShare marketing manager. "Unfortunately, these documents are largely inaccessible to others, so people spend a great deal of time reinventing the wheel."
Xerox DocuShare solves this problem, allowing people to create virtual workspaces where they can easily share information, collaborate on documents and stay connected with co-workers. The community-based collaborative environment taps the Internet to deliver enterprisewide Web-based knowledge-sharing capabilities with minimal overhead.
KM is viewed from a two-dimensional perspective. The first dimension consists of the activities that are critical to knowledge creation and innovation: knowledge exchange, knowledge capture, knowledge reuse, and knowledge internalization. Collectively, these processes build a learning organization -- one skilled at creating, acquiring, and transferring knowledge as well as adapting its actions to reflect new insight and innovation.

The Ten Domains of Knowledge
According to Dan Holtshouse, Xerox director of business strategy knowledge initiatives, there are ten domains of knowledge which give structure to the activities around which KM plans should be built.
laboring to measure the value of knowledge in all its forms.
Companies that have mastered these domains are promoting knowledge sharing and best practices, making that sharing an enterprise-wide responsibility, and capturing and re-using past experiences.
KM leaders are now building and mining customer knowledge bases, mapping the knowledge of experts, and mixing explicit and tacit knowledge to achieve innovation. Finally, they are trying to manage their intellectual assets and—most difficult of all—are

The Challenge of Portals
Inside a large corporation, there may be dozens or even hundreds of intranets, each with hundreds of thousands of pages on it. And these intranets are controlled by very small, very fragmented groups of people.
The fragmentation of intranets has led to a need for an enterprise knowledge portal—a single point of access to enterprise resources.

The new portal technologies are being used to create a desktop "cockpit" that gives each individual user everything they need to do the job in one place. "These portals don't have complete functionality, but they provide that single point of access into all the applications and collaborative tools. They also include the taxonomy for finding the inference capabilities that are required to personalize information and push out information to users.

1. Staying Competitive with Knowledge Management

In the new economy, knowledge is the only real competitive advantage. Competing in time at Internet speed requires zero-drag-there's no opportunity for re-work or re-learning.
For now-familiar reasons, it becomes more imperative every day that organizations exploit their intellectual capital as effectively as possible.

New products and/or services have to be conceived, developed and delivered in just months, or even weeks, which pinches the intellectual margin. "Reinventing the wheel," slows down development, wasting valuable time and risking an organization's competitive advantage.
"Design rework is happening at an alarming rate of more than 65 percent in most companies," points out Philip George, vice president of worldwide marketing because people don't know that a problem has already been solved.

Finding information from colleagues and business partners is difficult. One sleep while the other work, one is on the road when the other is in office and there's a language barrier.
Studies have shown that the virtual team doesn't have to be scattered halfway around the world. Once the team members are out of earshot-fifty feet away-many of the 'virtual' issues begin to surface.

When a pivotal person leaves, the pain is widely and quickly felt. More insidious is the quiet decaying of an organization's "institutional knowledge" as the lesser-recognized depart without sharing their understanding of how to get things done.
"It's becoming increasingly difficult to acquire and retain employees, and a company's strongest asset is its people.," says Chris Moore, chief technology officer at TrainingServer Inc. Organizations that do not tap into their mind share and take advantage of the knowledge within will quickly fall behind."

There's so much more that an organization needs to know these days: competitors can spring up fast, they can come from anywhere and they may have access to insights and discoveries that can upend market hierarchies.

For virtually every organization, the squeeze is on: customers want to pay less while investors want more value from their portfolios. That means all the resources to which an organization can lay claim-including its intellectual resources-must be managed for the best result.

To sustain their competitiveness, organizations carefully craft processes to efficiently manufacture products and care for their customers, all in a effort to effectively exploit valuable resources. Yet Ernst &Young estimates that up to 80 percent of a company's intellectual resources-the knowledge residing within it-is not systematically applied to business processes.

A Rising Tide of KM Initiatives
Now more companies understand that they must develop strategies and processes expressly designed to best utilize intellectual re-sources in both day-to-day operations and long-term planning.

Creating Communities

Managing knowledge processes well also requires technologies that enable people to gravitate into communities of interest and expertise where their ability to share ideas and insights can spawn new knowledge and refine existing knowledge.

E-Learning
When these kinds of capabilities are combined with Internet-based training, or e-learning, an organization's learning vector can climb dramatically.

Organizations that overlook knowledge management risk the operational and financial inefficiencies that come with duplication of effort," observes Unisys' Keegan. Knowledge management solutions, once adopted, ensure there's a process in place for accessing and sharing the organization's intellectual capital. The benefits are pretty obvious. One saves money, leverage talent, capability and capacity. One reduces his time-to-market.

• The power to mine content that's important for decision-making out of vast amounts of structured production data.

• Better management of unstructured information by automating the ability to categorize it often involves both contextualization and personalization.
• The means to deliver content proactively, usually through an information portal that integrates collaboration tools.

There have been many roadblocks to adoption of formal knowledge management activities. In general, managing knowledge has been perceived as an unmanageable kind of problem — an implicitly human, individual activity — that was intractable with traditional management methods and technology.

We tend to treat the activities of knowledge work as necessary, but ill-defined, costs of human resources, and we treat the explicit manifestations of knowledge work as forms of publishing — as byproducts of "real" work.

The nature of business itself has changed, in at least two important ways:

1. Knowledge work is fundamentally different in character from physical labor.
2. The knowledge worker is almost completely immersed in a computing environment. This new reality dramatically alters the methods by which we must manage, learn, represent knowledge, interact, solve problems, and act.

One can’t solve the problems of Information Age business or gain a competitive advantage simply by throwing more information and people at the problems. And one can’t solve knowledge-based problems with approaches borrowed from the product-oriented, print-based economy. Those solutions are reactive and inappropriate.

Applying technology blindly to knowledge-related business problems is a mistake, too, but the computerized business environment provides opportunities and new methods for representing "knowledge" and leveraging its value.

1. View the organization as a human community capable of providing diverse meanings to information outputs generated by the technological systems, instead of the traditional emphasis on command and control.
2. De-emphasize the adherence to the "way things have always been done" so that such prevailing practices may be continuously assessed from multiple perspectives for their alignment with the dynamically changing external environment.
3. Encourage diverse viewpoints by avoiding premature consensus on issues that need deeper analysis of underlying assumptions. Often, viewpoints of persons with differing backgrounds and expertise can provide a much broader focus that is essential for completely grasping the essence of the core issues, particularly when the changing context demands a fresh look at what was yesterday defined as a "benchmark" or a "best practice."
4. Encourage greater proactive involvement of human imagination and creativity to facilitate greater internal diversity to match the variety and complexity of the wicked environment.
5. Give more explicit recognition to tacit knowledge and related human aspects, such as ideals, values, or emotions, for developing a richer conceptualization of knowledge management.

6. Implement new, flexible technologies and systems that support and enable communities of practice, informal and semi-informal networks of internal employees and external individuals based on shared concerns and interests.

7. Make the organizational information base accessible to organization members who are closer to the action, while simultaneously ensuring that they have the skills and authority to execute decisive responses to changing conditions.

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