Knowledge Management in Practice

Chapter 6^th of the book, “Knowledge Management (KM) in processes in Organization : Theoretical Foundations and Practice” that written by Claire R. Mc Inerney.

In order to protect ‘knowledge management’, there are three types of generally considered to be essential: finding or uncovering knowledge, sharing knowledge, and the development of the new knowledge. Finding information or knowledge refers to that allow organizations to make sense and make use of data, information, and knowledge objects that may be present but are not codified, analyzed, nor accessible to members. In the knowledge development, the members have to share their knowledge, its purpose to deploy the knowledge. So if any members who quit from the project or organization, people who handle his job can continue it with more easily. With technology, the knowledge is more easily recorded and managed than manual record operation. So, the knowledge developing process, can be more effective and efficient, it caused, organization just continue develop knowledge that have found by the members, although, the member have finished his contract.

After the knowledge have developed, organization in implement that knowledge to do their task, organization also have to audit the knowledge. Some of the reasons for and benefits of an information audit include:

1.      The elucidation of what information the organization possesses: wher it is located? How is it organized? How can it be accessed? Who is responsible for it?

2.      Identification of duplicate or partial duplicated information and information gathering and maintenance, with the potential realization of cost savings.

And then continue to the tag and taxonomy stage of knowledge management which consist primarily of assembling various information resource in some sort of portal like environment and making them available to the organization. After that, the knowledge has to deposit in the databases and retrieve from databases to learned, as a way to develop new knowledge or reuse the knowledge. According to the knowledge or information post, we may know, who is the expert. And when we know who is the expert, we can refers to them, to search information or knowledge and try to capture it. So we can be easily to get what knowledge that we need and want.

And then, organization should develop a Community of Practice, where groups or individuals with shared interest that come together in person or virtually to tell stories, discuss best practice and talk over lesson learned. In CoP, using the technology can be increase individuals or groups interest to discuss and share knowledge, because it can link geographically dispersed organizations. Finally, according, to the expertise location and CoP, we can make a matriks that describe a relation between each individuals or groups in knowledge sharing and knowledge developing, and who is always to be reference as a source of a knowledge.