CAN ORGANIZATIONAL KNOWLEDGE BE MANAGED?

Now a days there is an increasing hype around the term “knowledge” many organization recognized knowledge is an important asset which is hidden in the minds of the employees of their organization. They want to use and manage knowledge for the maximum benefit of the organization. I want to explain how this knowledge is going to be used by the organizations effectively and whether that knowledge can be managed, before that I will give brief explanation about knowledge and knowledge management.

Knowledge is the term easy to understand but difficult to explain, many scholars gave many definitions to define knowledge but there is no particular definition for it. It can be define as the facts or conditions of knowing something with familiarity obtained through experience.(Ken Ward 1998). Here we have to think about again what is “knowing something”? Knowing can be defined as having both awareness and judgment.
When the term knowledge comes to organization and the way it is managed in the organization is called as the knowledge management. Knowledge management can be well defined as encompasses management strategies, technology and methods for leveraging intellectual capital and how to achieve gains in human performance and competiveness.(Gatner 1996).

Why we need to manage organizational knowledge?
As the organizations recognize the importance of the knowledge, they think knowledge has to be managed for some of the factors which are as follows
Knowledge is required to meet the increasing competiveness in market places and the rate of innovation is rising, reduction in staffing creates a need to replace informal knowledge with the formal methods, the competitive pressure reduce the size of the work force that holds valuable business knowledge, to diminish the amount of time available to experience and acquire knowledge, increasing mobility and early retirements of the work force leads to loss of knowledge.(Barclay & Murray 1997).

How to manage organizational knowledge:
The business strategy of the organization must acknowledge the requirement to capture knowledge and actively develop the effort. Massive human effort is required as the knowledge exists in people but not in technology, technology only help in the capture of information but it can’t create knowledge. Some of the useful technologies that will help to manage knowledge include search engines, intelligent agents, database management systems and repositories.(Mullins 1999).
When the information is identified, collected and managed it must be transformed into knowledge. This knowledge requires classification, analysis and synthesis. For doing this also human intervention is required. As knowledge is created only by human but not by technology only human being can retrieve information into format that causes it to be easily transformed into knowledge by another human being upon retrieval. Some of the technologies that can be used in this phase of knowledge management process include data mining tools, statistical analysis tools, and decision support system.

The final phase is effectively communicating the captured knowledge, the technology that helps to facilitate communication includes workflow management system,
networking technology, groupware and mobile computing. The captured knowledge has to be communicated easily in any format preferred by the recipients.

I can support above statements by giving an example how knowledge is managed in the imperial manufacturing company. As imperial is a manufacturing company there is a lot of human force is required to manufacture the products. The employees who are in manufacturing department may face many problems with the machinery or with new equipment these problems are noted or recorded by the employee on notice board and displayed in the factories if any employee is familiar with this type of problem and who knows the solution can give his experience and solution. These problems and solutions are recorded in the company data base and maintained for the future generation employees if they face the same type of problem they can access this data base and can solve the problem quickly.

Problems in managing knowledge effectively in organizations:
The first obstruction to successes is dealing with the people who have the knowledge as many business people feel that “knowledge is power” so if they give knowledge they feel as they give up there power. This type of attitude has to be stopped and knowledge has to be shared freely. A more frequent problem is lack of time to capture the knowledge that exist in their employees. For example the sales person may know the competitive information but he is always on the road and needs to close business to make his given targets. But if he is encouraged to give the information about the long term concerns it would be more useful.

Conclusion:
Yes, I say that organizational knowledge can be managed and this can only happen by capturing the information from the environment make over and put into some kind of knowledge repository that is widely available to those who may need it now and in future. By using computer networks tools they can be designed to make it possible for employees to process knowledge effectively.

References:

(Barclay & Murray 1997) “ what is knowledge Management” from the article of “knowledge praxis. Retrieved from http://www.media-access.com/whatis.html.

(Mullins 1999) “ what is knowledge and can it be managed” published in the data administration newsletter. Retrieved from http://www.tdan.com/view-articl