A lot of organizations around the globe start to
realize the potential of knowledge as there are more and more competitions in
today business world. Knowledge is the main source to build competitive
advantages for many organizations around the globe. Without sufficient knowledge in the business
areas such as customers, product/service, process, people, and technology, organizations
are likely to fail in the future as it loses competitive advantage to the
competitors. Every organization needs to manage its knowledge effectively and
efficiency in order to survive in our contemporary knowledge economy. Knowledge
Management (KM) plays an essential role for the success of one business. According
to KM book, it defines KM as the process for developing knowledge and knowledge
assets to build knowledge strategy, supporting first to build strategy and then
its implementation (Jawadekar, Knowledge Management, 2011, p. 67) . Knowledge
Management is designed into a system where it goes through a range of specific
processes. KM System (KMS) is a system for managing knowledge in the
organization for supporting identification, creation, acquisition,
codification, and dissemination of intellectual capital to implement the
operation of a business. It is divided into two cycles: knowledge development
(KD) cycle and knowledge management (KM) cycle; they are interrelated from one to
another. In this essay, I would like to discuss only about the KD cycle which is
about identification, validation, creation, and acquisition of knowledge. I
will explain each phase in the KD cycle, and illuminate the differences and
challenges of each process.
Knowledge identification is the first step in KMS. It
identifies the source of knowledge and determines whether the current knowledge
needs to be updated. The quest for new knowledge is very practical these days
as the world keeps changing most of the time. A high competitive pressure in modern
business environment has called for an innovation in most organizations. Organizations
that are well detected the existing knowledge and put effort in updating the
knowledge can increase competitive advantages and outperform the competitors. There are many ways in which organization can use
to identify new knowledge. For explicit knowledge, organization can use
information technology (IT) as a tool to capture new knowledge. IT is very
useful to unveil hidden knowledge by analyzing and studying the correlations of
existing data and information (Frost, 2010) . For example, Apple Company
can use data of its sales to learn about when and where it usually makes high
volume of sales. Identifying tacit knowledge is quite a challenge for many
organizations as it requires careful attention and observation from managers.
Managers need to have a deep understanding of what their organization’s
employees actually know and how to divert their knowledge into explicit
knowledge. Qualitative and quantitative
tools such as knowledge interviews, surveys, and questionnaire can assist
managers to innovate/identify tacit knowledge. Managers in some organization
also use IT to seek for experts and communities within their organization. For
instance, Nike installed an intranet in its organization in mid-1997 to learn
about a project in which it brought many experts in many countries to make
product design decisions (Kenneth & Jane, 2010) . Some problems generally arise during knowledge
identification process. There are times when it is very hard to identify the
source of knowledge. In this way, knowledge is not only exist within the
organization; it can locate somewhere outside the organization as well. Even
the organization identifies the source, but it may also incomplete or maybe there
are lots of data and information which are useless. In order to avoid such
problems, knowledge experts needs to have a real understanding about the
business.
Knowledge validation is another step of KD cycle.
The purpose of this step is to ensure the highest level and appropriateness of identified
knowledge for designing business strategy and dealing with the current problems
of the business. There are plenty of reasons that we need to control the
quality of knowledge before we can encode it into a system. Firstly, knowledge
engineers sometimes misinterpret the expert’s knowledge or maybe fail to
capture the whole expert’s insight. There are also some instances in which
experts provide wrong information and this in turn will tremendously affect the
usefulness of that information. In order to deal with the problems in
validation of knowledge, a knowledge that was identify needs to evaluate, test
for validation, and verify before managers can use it to deal with particular
problem(s) within the organization. Evaluation of knowledge requires judging an
expert’s system overall value and analyzing the level of usefulness,
efficiency, and cost of the knowledge system (Efraim Turban and Jay E. Aronson, 2001) . The validation of
the identified knowledge deals with the performance of the system by comparing
the knowledge system to the expert’s system. The knowledge needs to test for
the level of accuracy to know whether the right system was build or not. After testing the validity of the identified knowledge,
knowledge teams need to verify the consistency and completeness of this knowledge.
Once the identified knowledge has been successfully come across the
verification process, then the identified knowledge is useful to implement in
business operation.
Knowledge creation is the next step in KMS. It aims
to develop and generate new knowledge to enhance organization success and
economic well-beings. Knowledge creation is very important since it is the
driver of innovation in most organizations and there are many unsolved problems
that existing knowledge cannot resolve. There are varieties of methods in which
organizations can develop new knowledge. Organizations\ can purchase knowledge
from other entities such as competitors, researchers, partners, and consulting
firms if knowledge exists outside the organization. It is easy to acquire
knowledge from others if they are willing to share. However, most organizations
are not willing to sell/share its tacit and/or private knowledge and even if
they sell, they will sell it at a very high price. Another way to create new
knowledge is through research and development projects, experimental, and
observations. These methods are frequently used to seek for nonexistent
knowledge. Billions of dollars have been spent every year to search for new
knowledge. The stiff competition in today business world has coerced many organizations
to seek for new ideas most of the time in order to cope with competitions. Besides
acquiring and engaging in research/experiments, organizations can also create
new knowledge by learning from their previous information/data. Some valuable
knowledge may lie in the existing data, but they might have forgone by experts
as it was store in an unorganized form. It is hard for knowledge engineers to understand
and capture information from the unprocessed data. Organizations should invest
in information management system since this system facilitates organization’s
employees in understanding and extracting knowledge from previous data. New knowledge
generally arises during the movement of tacit and explicit knowledge. In
socialization process where tacit knowledge creates from tacit knowledge,
people can gain new knowledge through working with other person(S). For
externalization process, new concepts are generally built as more and more
people access to the now explicit knowledge. People will try to divert the now
explicit knowledge into other new ideas and theories. The combination process
occasionally creates new explicit knowledge as the data/information combines
together to unveil useful information. Internalization process is where
knowledge creation happens mostly since it delivers explicit knowledge to each
individual to make it tacit knowledge. SECI model is very useful in
facilitating knowledge creation in the organization. Without this model, new
knowledge will not exist.
Knowledge acquisition is the last step in KD cycle.
It is defined as the process of extracting, structuring and
organizing knowledge from one source, usually human experts, so it can be used
in software (Jones, 1989) .
Knowledge acquisition typically supported by knowledge creation process. The
acquisition of knowledge usually begins with the process of receiving new
information. Once organization received new information, it will send it to knowledge
experts to evaluate and determine the usefulness of that information to build
knowledge strategy for supporting business operation. When experts completed their
valuation and found out that the information is useful, they will encode the
new information into a system for later use. There are five main sources of
knowledge acquisition: customers, suppliers, competitors, partners/alliances,
merges and acquisitions (Frost, 2010) .
These sources of knowledge are very important in designing business strategies.
For example, Sony Corporation uses knowledge about its customer to improve
marketing and design decisions. Knowledge acquisition focuses on three main
topics (Jawadekar, Knowledge Management, 2011) . First, the business
domain and problem domain need to assess the appropriateness of the knowledge
in designing business strategy. Second, the source of expertise must be identified
and evaluate to ensure the application of the knowledge required by the
organization. Lastly, the specific techniques and participants need to be
identified to engage knowledge initiative. A lot of organizations are facing
problems with the acquisition of knowledge. In this respect, some experts
hesitate to share their knowledge or might not easy to cooperate. On other
occasion, the method of acquisition is not fully refined and complicated. Some
methods are implicit, unclear, and weak which could cause the evaluation of
knowledge ineffective. Testing knowledge
is also complicated task as there are many sources to test and/or there might
be some incomplete information. At times, Knowledge engineers who extract the
knowledge from experts may have problems in interpersonal communication which
leads to inconsistent of information gathering. As there are many problems associated
the acquisition phase, organization needs to experiment the new knowledge
attentively before encodes it into the organization system.
To sum
up, knowledge management is very important for our contemporary knowledge
economy. Organizations need to manage their knowledge effectively and
efficiency in order to gain competitive advantages. As there is a stiff
competition in today business environment, many organizations around the globe
have called for knowledge management system. KMS is a system for supporting KM;
it is split into two different cycles: Knowledge Development cycle and
Knowledge Management Cycle. In this essay, I am interested to discuss only
about the first cycle which is about identification, validation, creation and
acquisition of knowledge. The KD cycle begins with the identification of
knowledge. An appropriate knowledge needs to be identified in order to move on
to the validation phase. The knowledge that has been identified prerequisites
to test for its validation before knowledge engineers can integrate it into
systems and processes of the organization. Knowledge creation is the next step
of KD cycle; it is where new knowledge is created. Organization can develop new
knowledge through purchasing or, research and development projects. Knowledge
creation is a dynamic activity that can enhance organization success and
economic well-being. Knowledge acquisition is quite similar to knowledge
creation and it is about taking or capturing knowledge from a source in order
to store in a system. The acquisition of knowledge usually support by knowledge
creation process. There are usually some problems arise during each process of
the KD cycle. Organizations that fail to avoid or solve those problems will not
be able to manage its knowledge effectively and efficiently. It will be better
for organization to design a specific knowledge teams or information management
system in order to cap with those problems and make an effective use of its
knowledge.
Bibliography
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https://engineering.purdue.edu/~engelb/abe565/knowacq.htm
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