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What is Knowledge Management? Essay examples

Good Essays

Introduction*
Generally, knowledge is interpreted, subjective information within a context, which involves understanding and is mostly tacit, not explicit. Knowledge can take many forms. It can be in the form of thoughts, insights, ideas, lore, lessons learnt, practices, and experiences undergone to name just a few.
The term knowledge management has become common in businesses throughout the world. Despite its increased prevalence, there remains a large degree of confusion concerning the applied definition of what knowledge management is. Within the knowledge management community, attempts at defining this elusive term appear to be in constant flux. However, a basic description of what constitutes knowledge management, and the various …show more content…

Rote processes are good examples of explicit knowledge.
Tacit: that knowledge which requires development of intuition and judgement, generally the result of experience and/or close relational learning modeled by the journeyman/apprentice model.

*Source: Gartner Group

Stair Step Chart

As knowledge goes from tacit to explicit, the volume decreases as the information is captured into a generally useable form:

Culture and technology are shown here as the key drivers of knowledge management, and both encompass many things. Culture is more than just people - it covers behaviour, organisations and reward structures, for example - just as technology is more than just IT - we use it to mean the whole supporting infrastructure for knowledge management. Technology is the key driver for capturing and using knowledge, while culture is key to the activities of sharing and learning.
Capturing core knowledge: characterised by a growing awareness of the kinds of knowledge that relate to a core capability. This phase is dominated by identifying and locating that knowledge and putting in place the technical infrastructure to facilitate capture. The organisation recognises the value of knowledge management to its business, and begins its journey with a few successful pilots, which then attract the interest of a wider community.

Sharing between communities: the

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