what is knowledge management

what is knowledge ?
knowledge is "knowing something with familiarity gained through experience ,education,observation,or investigation,it is understanding a process ,practice,or technique or how to use a tool."

According to Malhotra,yogesh.(1998) knowledge management
"Knowledge management caters to critical issues of adaption,survival and competence in face of inncreasingly discontinous environmental change.Essentially,it embodies organizational processes that seek synergistic combination of data and information processing capacity of information technologies, the creative and innovative capacity of the human beings"(malhotra 1997)

In my opinion knowledge management deals with 'doing the right thing'instead doing things right'. in my thinking knowledge management is the strategic framework of the organisation to view the processes as a knowledge process.in my view every business process involves with creation of process,dissemination of the process,renewal of the process and also application of knowledge to make the process effecient.

Is knowledge management necessary to companies?
Every organization needs knowledgeable employees to make effective and efficient procedures to run the operations and processes in the organization.knowledge of the employees is wealth to every organization . If the maximum utilization of employees knowledge(their valuable ideas and suggestions) is profit to organization in the form of better processes and procedures.

a new concept is evolved known as' information value chain' to 'knowledge value chain '. Here information value chain means technological systems are the key components which helps the organization to guide the business processes of that particular company while humans are passive processors they implement the best management practices in the information databases of the organization.

example:
I want to explain a day to day knowledge management activity that takes place in my organization(info media India ltd). as we conduct brain storming classes to my employees in the organization.we will help them in giving necessary unique selling points to sell the products and also we take suggestions from our customers the employees to make our products and services effective and better.as we are into media space we have different people working like journalists,editors,publishers and advertisers. we arrange a weekend and month end meeting to share our experiences and thoughts to improve our service ,quality and integrity. we usually have meeting about competitors strategy and market conditions inorder to gain competitive advantage.so i feel knowledge management activity is essential these days to sustain in the competitive market.

Reference:
-knowledge organizations &knowledge workers :A view from Front lines (WWW document).URL:http://brint.com/interview/maeil.htm
(it is published in Maiel business news paper of february 19,1998)