The Need & Benefits of KM

Introduction

Understanding the need for KM doesn't translate as easily as the need for high quality IT systems or for ensuring that the a company meets sales target for shareholders etc.

KM Responsibility

Knowledge management is responsible for understanding:

• Reveals what your organization knows.

• Where this knowledge is located and what form the knowledge is stored i.e. in people's minds or digital/physical data sources.

• How to best transfer this knowledge e.g. creating mentoring/coaching capabilities or implementing content management systems for easy access to knowledge.

• Assessing the organization's know-how and needs. Then to create a plan to reach the desired state of knowledge e.g. hiring, reassigning employees or implementing knowledge creation processes.

Why is KM useful?

• KM places a focus on knowledge as an actual asset or a capability.

• KM enables organizations to:

• Learn from previous mistakes and successes creating a best practices guide.

• Reusing knowledge i.e. best practices can be shared across the organization by reassigning employees to areas that require a certain knowledge set.

• Develop the right competencies and skills and removing obsolete knowledge.

• Improve the organization(s) ability to innovate.

• Enables an organization to protect the asset and make use of it accordingly.

Business Drivers for KM

The major business drivers behind today’s increased interest and application of KM lie in four key areas:

1. Globalization of business and Working remotely

1. • Organizations are now more global and more employees are working from home therefore, the need for knowledge sharing is required.

2. Increase Domain Complexity

   • Greater Domain Complexity = Greater Complexity of Knowledge to complete a task and Technology is increasing the domain complexity rapidly.

3. Accelerating Market Volatility

   • The pace of change has increased rapidly

   • Quick decision making to ensure companies retain their market share.

4. Intensified speed of responsiveness

   • We are doing more and we are doing it faster but we also need to work smarter as knowledge workers i.e. there is an increased pace and workload.

   • With technological advances, the expectation of response times changed to minutes and no longer days/weeks.

5. Employee Turnover

   • When employees are retrenched or resign from the organization, there is a loss of knowledge.

   • This leads to corporate amnesia from which some companies do not recover, costing them more in the long term.

Benefits of KM

1. Improved decision making.

2. Improved competitiveness.

3. Retaining knowledge.

4. Reducing the levels of abstractionism assists with onboarding of new employees.

5. Intelligence Encapsulation.