What’s this? Apart from the fact that it says Knowledge Management at the top, why is it important? Wikipedia has 5.5M users, over 2M articles, website ranked 9 th in the world, 16% of all page views in the world – all this is people sharing knowledge on a voluntary basis. Issues of quality, anonymity, currency, vandalism. Knowledge or information? Public access - different from K sharing within an organisation or project.
Data - discrete, objective facts (exists without people) A TRAIN DEPARTS EVERY 30 MINUTES Information - data that makes a difference, organised data, useful data (exists but personal CONTEXT starts to come in) THE TRAIN I WANT DEPARTS AT 1700 Knowledge – includes experience, values and insights that act as a framework for interpreting new experiences and information – a process, a human cabability. Only exists with CONTEXT – IF I MISS THE 1700 I WON’T BE HOME IN TIME FOR DINNER, I NEED £2 FOR THE CAR PARK Wisdom – even more context, understanding, values – TRAINS RUN ON RAILS, IF I TRAVEL BY TRAIN IT’S BETTER FOR THE ENVIRONMENT THAN IF I TRAVEL BY CAR Explicit knowledge is knowledge that has been codified (words, numbers, other symbols) and is easily transferable. Tacit knowledge can not easily be codified and is not easily transferred.
Includes management of data and information – but this is the easy bit.
14 Human resource management based practices to encourage knowledge flows directly between people (such as incentives for knowledge sharing, networking initiatives and community building). Information and communications technology projects to facilitate explicit knowledge flows (such as designing portals and intranets and group decision support systems). Marketing activities that build relationships to encourage knowledge flows into our organizations (such as creating customer relationship management systems). Financial re-evaluations (such as intellectual capital measurement that provide feedback on the effectiveness of knowledge flows).