Knowledge Management Systems
There is no universal agreement on what exactly is meant by the term knowledge management. In general, however, knowledge management refers to the processes an organization uses to gain the greatest value from its knowledge assets. Recall that data are raw, unformatted symbols such as characters or numbers. Information is data that have been formatted, organized, or processed in some way so that the result is useful to people. We need knowledge to understand relationships between different pieces of information. Consequently, what constitutes knowledge assets are all the underlying skills, routines, practices, principles, formulas, methods, heuristics, and intuitions. All data- bases, manuals, reference works, textbooks, diagrams, displays, computer files, proposals, plans, and any other artifacts in which both facts and procedures are recorded and stored are considered knowledge assets. From an organizational point of view, properly used knowledge assets enable an organization to improve its efficiency, effectiveness, and, of course, profitability. Additionally, as many companies are beginning to lose a large number of baby boomers to retirement, companies are using knowledge management systems to capture these crucial knowledge assets. Clearly, effectively managing knowledge assets will enhance business intelligence.
Knowledge assets can be categorized as being either explicit or tacit. Explicit knowledge assets reflect knowledge that can be documented, archived, and codified, often with the help of information systems. Explicit knowledge assets reflect much of what is typically stored in a DBMS. In contrast, tacit knowledge assets reflect the processes and procedures that are located in a person’s mind on how to effectively perform a particular task. Identifying key tacit knowledge assets and managing these assets so that they are accurate and available to peo- ple throughout the organization remains a significant challenge.
Tacit knowledge assets often reflect an organization’s best practices procedures and processes that are widely accepted as being among the most effective and/or efficient. Identifying how to recognize, generate, store, share, and manage this tacit knowledge is the primary objective for deploying a knowledge management system. Consequently, a knowledge management system is typically not a single technology but rather a collection of technology-based tools that include communication technologies such as e-mail, groupware, instant messaging, and the like as well as information storage and retrieval systems, such as wikis or DBMSs, to enable the generation, storage, sharing, and management of tacit and explicit knowledge assets (Malhotra, 2005).
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