Week: 8

Date: 15 April 2020

SBM4202 Weekly Questions

Week 8 Knowledge Management

1. Demonstrate your understanding of two fundamental approaches to knowledge
management: a process and a practice approach.

The process approach endeavors to classify authoritative information through

formalized controls, procedures, and innovations. Associations embracing the
procedure approach may actualize unequivocal arrangements administering how
information is to be gathered, put away, and scattered all through the association.
The procedure approach much of the time includes the utilization of data
advances to upgrade the quality and speed of learning creation and conveyance
in the associations. These innovations may incorporate intranets, information
warehousing, learning stores, choice help apparatuses, and groupware.
The practice approach to knowledge with learning the board accept that a lot of
authoritative information is unsaid in nature and that formal controls, procedures,
and advances are not appropriate for transmitting this sort of comprehension.

2. Discuss the components of intellectual capital management with regards to

individual competence, internal structure, external structure.
Components of intellectual capital management with regards to individual
competence:
 The capacity to act in a wide variety of situations to create both tangible
and intangible assets.
 The ability to be creative and inventive.
 Employees are voluntary members of an organization but tend to be loyal
if treated fairly and given autonomy and shared responsibility.

Components of intellectual capital management with regards to internal

structure:
 Patents, concepts, models.
  IT and administrative systems, processes.
 Organizational culture and environment.

Components of intellectual capital management with regards to external

structure:
 Relationships with customers.
 Relationships with suppliers.
 Brand names and trademarks.
 Organization’s reputation and image.

3. ‘knowledge management is mostly culture and people, with technology thrown

in.’ (Liebowitz, 2001, p.42). Critically evaluate the statement.

I am in the branch that says technology is part of the infrastructure and the
informationcultureinfluences the KM strategy. Knowledge management requires
the role of the technology themost. Without technology or technology playing
minimum role won't be able to give rise to proper knowledge management. The
data that requires for knowledge management simply cannot be handled
properly without the technology help like database storage and various
enterprise level software. That is why, technology has as much role in
knowledge management and culture and people work in unison with technology
to do that.

4. Explain the difference between tacit and explicit knowledge, giving examples of
each.
Tacit knowledge (knowing-how): knowledge embedded in the human mind
through experience and jobs. Know-how and learning embedded within the
minds of people. Personal wisdom and experience, context-specific, more
difficult to extract and codify. Tacit knowledge Includes insights, intuitions.
Explicit knowledge (knowing-that): knowledge codified and digitized in books,
documents, reports, memos, etc. Documented information that can facilitate
action. Knowledge what is easily identified, articulated, shared and employed.

Explicit knowledge Tacit (implicit) knowledge

 Objective, rational, technical Subjective, cognitive, experiential learning  
 Structured Personal
 Fixed content Context sensitive/specific
 Context independent Dynamically created
 Externalized Internalized
 Easily documented Difficult to capture and codify
 Easy to codify Difficult to share
 Easy to share Has high value
 Easily transferred/ taught/learned Hard to document
  Exists in high volumes Hard to transfer/teach/learn
  Involves a lot of human interpretation

5. Summarize and define the nature and key elements of knowledge and
knowledge management.

Knowledge Management (KM) is the process of generating, accumulating,

sharing and using knowledge for improving organizationalperformance. It is
creation of new skills, capabilities, competencies and sharing the use of this
knowledge by organizational members. In other words, it is a process of creating
an interactive learning environment where people transfer and share what they
know, internalize it and apply it to create new knowledge.
The multidisciplinary nature of KM represents a double-edged sword. On the
one hand, it is an advantage because almost anyone can find a familiar
foundation on which to base their understanding and even practice of KM.
Someone with a background in journalism, for example, can quickly adapt his or
her skill set to the capture of knowledge from experts and reformulate them as
organizational stories to be stored in corporate memory.

Someone coming from a more technical database background can easily

extrapolate his or her skill set to design and implement knowledge repositories
that will serve as the corporate memory for that organization. However, the
diversity of KM also presents some challenges with respect to boundaries.
Skeptics argue that KM is not and cannot be said to be a separate discipline with
a unique body of knowledge.

This attitude is typically represented by phrases such as “KM is just IM

(Information Management)” or “KM is nonsensical it is just good business
practices.” It becomes very important to be able to list and describe what set of
attributes are necessary and are in themselves sufficient to constitute knowledge
management both as a discipline and as a field of practice that can be
distinguished from others.

One of the major attributes of KM relates to the fact that it deals with knowledge
as well as information. Knowledge is a more subjective way of knowing and is
typically based on experiential or individual values, perceptions, and experience.
The key elements that are drawn for knowledge management are:

 Cognitive science.
 Organizational science
 Linguistics and computational linguistics.
 Information technologies such as knowledge-based systems, document and
information management, electronic performance support systems, and database
technologies.

 Information and library science.

 Technical writing and journalism.
 Anthropology and sociology.
 Education and training.
 Storytelling and communication studies.

6. Discuss what is strategic knowledge management and its importance role in

attaining and sustaining competitive advantage or in achieving efficiency, and
effectiveness in operations supported and enabled through information, systems
and information systems. Use example of a company to illustrate your answer.

The latest approaches to strategic management (Ferreira et al., 2016) tend to

consider strategic alliances (as sources of knowledge) and intellectual capital
(human, structural and relational capital) as the main sources for a sustainable
competitive advantage. Strategic knowledge management (SKM) relates to the
processes and infrastructures organizations use to attain, create and share
knowledge for formulating strategy and making strategic decisions (Zack, 2002).
A knowledge strategy defines the overall approach an organization intent to take
to align its knowledge resources and capabilities to the intellectual requirements
of its strategy. A strategic attitude is necessary to achieve a sustainable
competitive advantage. There are ten basic categories of KM strategy: motivate,
network, supply, analyze, codify, disseminate, demand, act, invent, and
augment.

These are:
 Motivate: Examples include town hall and coffee talk sessions conducted
by senior leaders, notes from senior leaders to employees who contribute
reusable content, standardized performance goals, monthly progress
reports, and awards for those who set the best example of sharing their
knowledge.
 Network: Conversations between people are the basis of building trust,
gaining insights, and sparking new ideas. Storytelling ignites action,
builds trust, instills values, fosters collaboration, and transmits
understanding. The World Café method “helps us appreciate the
importance and connectedness of the informal webs of conversation and
social learning through which we discover shared meaning, access
collective intelligence, and bring forth the future.”
 Supply: Examples of supply strategies include project databases, skills
inventories, and document repositories. The content which is captured
 represents the raw materials. These can then be analyzed, codified,
disseminated, queried, searched for, retrieved, and reused.
 Analyze
 codify: Examples include designating documents as standard templates,
identifying processes and proven practices, and producing a catalogue of
official methods. Refining knowledge after it has been captured so that it
can more readily be reused renders it in a more valuable state.
 disseminate: Examples of knowledge dissemination strategies include
providing customized notifications of new or changed content, weekly
newsletters featuring new submissions to repositories, and a KM corner
on the organization’s home intranet page listing the top 10 most-reused
documents for the current month. Monthly podcasts featuring interviews
with thought leaders, weekly con calls featuring conversations about
lessons learned, and email messages sharing proven practices are also
good ways of increasing awareness.

 demand: Examples of demand strategies are expertise locators, ask the

expert processes, and search engines. User assistance and knowledge
help desks can help connect supply and demand by answering questions,
providing support, and searching for content. Specific tools and
techniques which enable demand for knowledge include e-learning
systems, threaded discussions, and Appreciative Inquiry.