Knowledge Organization

Submitted to: Submitted by:Miss. Ritima Malhotra Sahil jain

BBA-2,2428

Knowledge Organization

What Is Knowledge OrganizationA knowledge organization is a management idea, describing an organization in which people use systems and processes to generate, transform, manage, use, and transfer knowledge-based products and services to achieve organizational goals.

Overview Of knowledge organizationFrom a functional perspective, in a knowledge organization, content (objects, data, information,

knowledge, and wisdom) are generated by knowledge workers. Content is captured, organized, and preserved to enable its reuse and leveraging by people and groups other than those who generated it. Infrastructure is in place to enable sharing of content across all elements of an organization and with external partners, as appropriate. Procedures are in place to integrate content from multiple sources and mobilize it to achieve organizational goals and objectives. A learning culture promotes not only individual learning but also results in a shared understanding. Finally, the organization embraces continuous evolutionary change to sustain itself in a constantly changing environment.`

Simard et al. (2007) described five functions of a knowledge-service organization:

generate content

transform content into useful products and services

preserve and manage content to enable organizational use and external transfer

use content to achieve organizational goals, and

transfer content externally, in the form of products and services.

Functions 1, 3, and 5 are essential and cannot be bypassed.

History Of Knowledge OrganizationIn the 1970s Peter Drucker (1974) may have been the first to describe knowledge workers and knowledge work.

Knowledge is created and used by people. Strass man (1985) described the transformation of work in the electronic age from the standpoint of education and training for managers and employees, human aspects of the working environment, and issues of morale, motivation, privacy, and displacements.

In 1990 Charles M. Savage observed that the nature of an organization based on knowledge rather than industrial society notions of land, labor, or capital was not well understood. McGee and Prusak (1993) noted that core competencies are not what an organization owns, but rather what it knows.

PROCESS OF KNOWLEDGE ORGANIZATIONThis section will deal with the actual knowledge management processes.There are six Process of Knowledge organization are: •Knowledge Discovery & Detection•Knowledge Organization & Assessment•Knowledge Sharing•Knowledge Reuse•Knowledge Creation•Knowledge Acquisition

Knowledge Discovery and DetectionThis step deals with discovering the knowledge that a firm possesses all over the organization, as well as the patterns in the information available that hide previously undetected pockets of knowledge.

Once knowledge is created, it exists within the organization. However, before it can be reused or shared it must be properly recognized and categorized. This subsection deals with the former aspect, while the following subsection deals with the latter

Explicit Knowledge: This is largely a process of sorting through documents and other records, as well as discovering knowledge within existing data and knowledge repositories. For the latter, IT can be used to uncover hidden knowledge by looking at patterns and relationships within data and text

Tacit Knowledge: Discovering and detecting tacit knowledge is a lot more complex and often it is up to the management in each firm to gain an understanding of what their company's experts actually know. Since tacit knowledge is considered as the most valuable in relation to sustained competitive advantage, this is a crucial step, a step that often simply involves observation and awareness. There are several qualitative and quantitative tools/practices that can help in the process; these include knowledge surveys, questionnaires, individual interviews, group interviews, focus groups, network analysis, and observation.Embedded knowledge: This implies an examination and identification of the knowledge trapped inside organizational routines, processes, products etc. which has not already been made explicit. Management must essentially ask "why do we do something a certain way?" This type of knowledge discovery involves observation and analysis, and the use of reverse engineering and modeling tools.

Knowledge Organization & AssessmentThe idea that firms should categorize their knowledge assets is not a new one (Horvath 2000, Bukowitz & Williams 1999). In order to determine what resources they have at their disposal and to pin point strengths and weaknesses, management needs to organize the knowledge into something manageable.

Explicit knowledge organization: IT is generally encouraged as a means of organizing and retrieving (Gamble and Blackwell 2001, Botha et al 2008, etc.). IT based systems use taxonomies and ontologies to classify and organize knowledge and information (Bali et al 2009). These are categorization methods that create a logical, hierarchical knowledge map, allowing the user to navigate by category

Tacit knowledge organization: Use of focus groups, expertise guides, social network analysis, and knowledge coordinators (Gamble and Blackwell 2001 and Liebowitz 2009). The role of the latter is to understand in which context the tacit knowledge was created.

Embedded Knowledge organization: Job/workplace design, workflow analyses and performance measures (Gamble & Blackwell 2001) can be used to organize and assess embedded knowledge. Mapping is also useful here, and knowledge maps outlining embedded knowledge can be formulated under the guidance of knowledge brokers (Horvath 2000).

Knowledge SharingAs stated earlier, knowledge management is fundamentally about making the right knowledge or the right knowledge sources (including people) available to the right people at the right time. Knowledge sharing is therefore perhaps the single most important aspect in this process, since the vast majority of KM initiatives depend upon it.

Knowledge Reuse Two mechanisms employed by organizations to motivate the

reuse of knowledge from knowledge repositories is using experts to control or edit users’ contributions (such as in a refereed repository), or using a community of users to review, rate, or edit existing contributions (such as in a community-driven wiki). The goal of this paper is to explore these two mechanisms and study their impact on knowledge reuse by organizational members. Propositions are suggested by drawing upon the dual-process theory from cognitive psychology.

Knowledge Creation The ability to create new knowledge is often at the heart of the

organization's competitive advantage. Sometimes this issue is not treated as part of knowledge management since it borders and overlaps with innovation management (Wellman 2009). Since I chose a broader knowledge management definition, I very much regard it as a part of the process, and I will refer (albeit superficially) to some theories that pertain to innovation.

Knowledge Acquisition Knowledge acquisition refers to the knowledge that a firm can try to

obtain from external sources. External knowledge sources are important and one should therefore take a holistic view of the value chain (Gamble & Blackwell 2001). Sources include suppliers, competitors, partners/alliances, customers, and external experts. Communities of practice can extend well outside the firm.

Knowledge organization InstitutesThey are some organizational institutes which provide knowledge.