Components of Knowledge Management

1.Discuss the components of knowledge management knowledge Management System (KMS) is defined as an interconnected group of functions which is either technology-based or completely non-technical. These groups of functions facilitate or influence the discovery, integration, capture along with delivery of the knowledge which are important for an organisation to achieve its goals. It can also be considered as a part of knowledge management initiative or strategy that is undertaken to uplift the organisation’s intellectual domain (Séin-Echaluce et al. 2015).

KMS is an inherent system that can be openly managed. This signifies that the respective boundaries of a system are permeable to several different kind of information but different to different position. This means that what is useful for an employee in one branch of the organisation may seems to be useless to another employee who is serving the organisation via sitting in another corner of the world (Séin-Echaluce et al. 2015). Therefore, knowledge management imitative must have clear yet achievable goals that are capable of delivering the required benefits to any organisation or to a sub-set of organisation while taking into account the interest of the stakeholders. An effective knowledge management system is based on the clear understanding of:

1. Organisation’s mind set or motto of knowledge or business mantra
2. Specific goals of the organisation
3. The source of the knowledge of the organisation
4. The components of the knowledge
5. Central role of the employees in the organisation with-respect to the flow of the knwoledge and its utilisation

Figure: Components of Knowledge Management System

Source: Created by author

In the domain of KMS, first comes Strategy. Here the strategy identifies the important requirement and the issues that are associated with the organisation and thereby delivers a concrete framework for addressing these requirements (Akhavan, Jafari and Fathian 2012).

Problem: A problem or opportunity must exist in the organisation that provides the justification of the KMS.

Purpose/Objective: KMS must have an effective objective like sharing of good practise and collaboration.

Policy: KMS must always be linked with the organisational policy.

Governance: KMS must be managed through a tough government framework that articulates the role and the responsibilities of the important part of KMS.

Culture: KMS module is inclined with the culture of the organisation. Here culture is defined as the belief and values of the employees or stakeholders.

Risk: KMS must analyse the risk of the organisation in order channelize the risk management knowledge within the employee

KMS is projected towards the people who are directly or indirectly associated with the organisation. Such people are addressed as the actors of the organisation. The actors play a vital role in the flow of the knowledge, inspires the development of new knowledge (AF Ragab and Arisha 2013).

Owner: Who owns the business and has the completely authority to abolish the entire system or revamp the measures of performance

Resource: They are the employees of the organisations who are the main source of the knowledge development and flow

Clients: They are the beneficiaries of the organisation and it is due to the their benefit that the KMS is designed and then redesigned

Managers: They are responsible in the implementation of the overall knowledge management system

Enablers: Enablers are the IT or the HR staffs who made the necessary modification in the process of the KMS in order to channelize the flow of the knowledge

Importance of Knowledge Management

Boundary Spanners: They connect the work group of the organisation and help in the flow of knowledge

KMS required basic infrastructure in order to promote proper functioning of the system. Without the proper availability of the infrastructure, the flow along with the generation of the updated knowledge is not possible. In the ground of infrastructure, a special mention goes to the softwares and the networks. In this technology dependent era, softwares are the main source of the sustainable flow of the information. Any information (knowledge) can be disseminated among the stakeholders in a unique way via representing them through apps (software) Networks here refer to the social networking sites which are at present the principal source of the information channel and other PR (public relation) networks (Brown et al. 2013).

KMS system is development in order to promote the functionality of the overall organisation. It is the functionality upon which the entire operation of the system is based on. KMS helps in the enhancement of the visualization, formalization, transfer, distribution, retention, evolution and retrieval of the organisation process. Under the banner of functionality the main parameter of importance is transformation that deals with the socialization (transfer and sharing), externalization (knowledge capture), combination (business intelligence) and internalisation (knowledge delivery) (Alatawi et al. 2012).

Delivery is another crucial component of the KMS as the flow of the knowledge is only possible via the successful delivery of the information among the stakeholders. After delivery, there comes the Content. If the content of the knowledge is not unique then the overall goal of the KMS will not be achieved. Proper content of the content must be done via validation of the source and proper review of the collated information. The overall improvement of KMS is promoted by the continuous improvement plan which is the last important parameter of KMS (Silwattananusarn and Tuamsuk 2012).

2.Differentiate between tacit and explicit knowledge

Knowledge sharing is essential for an organisation to climb the ladder of success and the concept is extremely relevant at present competitive corporate market environment. Sharing of the information among the employees can increase the sustainability of the firm, thereby promoting competitive advantages. Numerous studies that have been carried on an organisations and KMS showed that the sharing of the employee knowledge uplifts the overall performance of the firm like increasing the capacity, innovation and performance parameter. Moreover, the sharing of knowledge among the members of the team is important in maintaining high standards among the group along with the maintenance of the organizational productivity. The knowledge shared among the employees can be classified as either explicit or tacit (Hau et al. 2013).

Explicit knowledge is defined as a form of searchable information that can be easily spotted. Under the banners of explicit knowledge, users can collaborate the values and simultaneously use of the knowledge. On the other hand, tacit knowledge means knowing how. It is the knowledge that is embedded in the mind of the human begins that is being gathered via the process of life and job experience. It can alternatively be define as the knowledge found in people heads that is difficult to share with other person via verbally stating it or via manual tabulation (Venkitachalam and Busch 2012). The term “tacit” knowledge was first described by Polanyi. According to him, “we can know more than we can tell”. He defined tacit knowledge as something which is extremely difficult to communicate. He also opined that is acquired via practise and experience and has less reference to knowledge via reading or studying literature. According to Polanyi, the skills of an individual are related to the concept of tacit knowledge. Here individual skills remain embedded within the original context. Furthermore he also stated that tacit knowledge is inseparable from the concept explicit knowledge. There lies an inherent relationship. The terms like intuition, skills, know-how, procedural knowledge, unarticulated knowledge, and experimentalknowledge, practical knowledge is used for describe tacit knowledge. These terms which are used to describe tacit knowledge show that tacit knowledge is conceptualized differently by several different disciplines (Kothari et al. 2012).According to researchers, tacit knowledge is multidimensional. Moreover it is also specific to content however, it is frequently embedded within the routines of the organisation and is extremely inclined towards practise and hence termed as practise related.The main challenge in the grounds of tactic system is the proper identification of the element of tactic knowledge that can be successfully captured and thereby transforming into explicit. However, the tacit knowledge that can never be captured or rather impossible to capture, the main goal of the sharing of the information then lies on the shoulders of the possessors of the tacit knowledge. Like proper connect of the bearer or generator of tacit knowledge with the learners of the knowledge. Tacit knowledge is at times used synonymous with the implicit knowledge. Implicit knowledge means any knowledge which is implied in a statement but is not documented in an explicit manner (Wang and Wang 2012).

Tacit Knowledge vs Explicit Knowledge

For effective KMS, both explicit and tactic knowledge are important. However, the challenge lies in sharing and implementation of the tacit knowledge. It is easy to conduct a research upon the knowledge of a community or over the published research papers in order to elucidate company’s standard procedures or other legal documentation over a particular topic. However, it difficult to understand about how someone has worked during any crisis moment or what was his or her mindset during that moment that has helped them to successfully recover that crisis. This is due to this reason that working under articulate tactic difficult is difficult and also one of the critical parts of any organisation (Meihami and Meihami 2014).

Figure: comparison between Explicit and Tacit Knowledge

Source: Park, Vertinsky and Becerra 2015

Figure: Difference between Explicit and Tacit Knowledge

Source: Schoenherr, Griffith and Chandra 2014

3.Discuss the importance of Knowledge Management and how it contributes to a sustainable busi. performance by relating to an organization of your choice

The public health system is extremely important for supporting the process of disease prevention, promotion of health and initiatives on the healthy public policies. GlaxoSmithKline has evolved as an extended enterprise which is powered by sophisticated knowledge and enriched information resources.Over the decades GlaxoSmithKline Australia has reframed their product line up on the basis of the KMS which has helped in their sustainable development. The field of proper knowledge management has provided methodological and proper technological framework to capture the experimental knowledge that is intrinsic to what is being done in a proactive manner. It also helped in the delivery of the proper empirical knowledge which has been derived from the probable outcomes. KMS also provides operationalize knowledge in healthcare to serve as a resource for strategic decision making(El Morrand Subercaze2010).

Healthcare enterprise like GlaxoSmithKline can be considered as data rich as they generate huge amount of data like clinical trial data, electronic medical records, hospital records, benchmarking findings, administrative reports and so on. However, it can also be said that the healthcare sectors are “knowledge poor”. This is due to the fact that data related to healthcare rarely gets transformed into a strategic decision-support system. This is due to this particular reason that the KMS along with Data Mining has gain importance. They facilitate the migration of empirical raw data towards empirical knowledge. This is capable of delivering a particular window to facilitate the internal dynamics between the healthcare organsation (Ferlie et al. 2012).

In GlaxoSmithKline, the basis of knowledge development came from different sources like resurgent of infectious diseases (for example HINI influenza), threats of bioterrorism (for example anthrax) and other disasters that occur in large scale like (New Orleans Haiti) and other chronic diseases which are in their advance stage (like life style diseases: diabetes, cardiovascular disease). All these are fatal threats against the growing and the existing population and thus have been targeted via GlaxoSmithKline as their main source of business improvement(Au.gsk.com 2017).

KMS is an interactive or process. Via this process exchange of knowledge takes place between health practitioner and healthcare researchers and other communities of practitioners. GlaxoSmithKline is mainly directly towards the public health and their main line up of the products are vaccines that are inclined on the infectious disease and several other consumer healthcare products like oral health, respiratory health, pain relief, skin care products or dermal health, nutrition and gastro-intestinal health(Au.gsk.com 2017).Public health is defined as a unique setting that deserves special attention with respect to the KMS. Here the public health practitioner must indulge in effective exchange of information both explicit and tactic in order operate complex environment that frequently deals with the emergencies, disaster response. Tactic knowledge is a valuable resource that is a key determining factor in any healthcare bodies dealing with the concern of public health and GlaxoSmithKline also follows the same path(Lobach et al. 2012).The medical researchers and the doctors who are working for GlaxoSmithKline for the development of new medicines for the treatment of fatal diseases have worked on both explicit and tactic knowledge. Here explicit knowledge involves the gathering of the scientific data and authentic yet relevant information about the latest disease trends, gene involved in disease modification and the multi-drug-resistant bacteria. All this explicit information can be easily is accessed from the online scientific journal papers and other peer-reviewed journals. Tactic knowledge on the other involves the experience of the stalwart researcher regarding how they are framing their hypothesis (for example: for the process of vaccine development with high efficacy) and how they are disseminating their thoughts and the scientific line up with their subordinates and thereby working as a team for the successful established of the hypothesis, overruling the null-hypothesis. Thus conversion of the tactic knowledge into explicit knowledge can be defined as externalization as performed by GlaxoSmithKline. It involves conversion of the tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge. The overall process of conversion encompasses the creation of new explicit knowledge from the pre-existing knowledge. On the otherhand internalization is performed when existing explicitknowledge is converted into tactic knowledge(Au.gsk.com 2017).

Thus the KMS of GlaxoSmithKline is mainly based on a novel approach that facilitates a synergy between proper knowledge procurement along with operationalization techniques. The modus operandi of the proposed synergy of the KMS of GlaxoSmithKline can thus be stated as follows: The Data Mining Techniques are used for mining of the healthcare data repositories. Data mining helps to derive decision-quality healthcare knowledge. Knowledge management techniques are then subsequently used to operationalize the overall inductively derive decision-quality healthcare knowledge(Holsapple 2013). This healthcare knowledge management system helped in the sustainable development of the GlaxoSmithKline among its market competitors and also helped them to revise their product lineup.

References

AF Ragab, M. and Arisha, A., 2013. Knowledge management and measurement: a critical review. Journal of Knowledge Management, 17(6), pp.873-901.

Akhavan, P., Jafari, M. and Fathian, M., 2012.Exploring the failure factors of implementing knowledge management system in the organizations.

Alatawi, F., Dwivedi, Y.K., Williams, M.D. and Rana, N.P., 2012, May. Conceptual model for examining knowledge management system (Kms) adoption in public sector organizations in Saudi Arabia.In tGOV Workshop (Vol. 12).

 Au.gsk.com. 2017. Products | GSK Australia. [online] Available at: https://au.gsk.com/en-au/products/ [Accessed 1 Dec. 2017].

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El Morr, C. and Subercaze, J., 2010. Knowledge management in healthcare.In Handbook of Research on Developments in e-Health and Telemedicine: Technological and Social Perspectives (pp. 490-510).IGI Global.

Ferlie, E., Crilly, T., Jashapara, A. and Peckham, A., 2012.Knowledge mobilisation in healthcare: a critical review of health sector and generic management literature. Social science & medicine, 74(8), pp.1297-1304.

Hau, Y.S., Kim, B., Lee, H. and Kim, Y.G., 2013. The effects of individual motivations and social capital on employees’ tacit and explicit knowledge sharing intentions. International Journal of Information Management, 33(2), pp.356-366.

Holsapple, C. ed., 2013. Handbook on knowledge management 1: Knowledge matters (Vol. 1). Springer Science & Business Media.

Kothari, A., Rudman, D., Dobbins, M., Rouse, M., Edwards, N. and Sibbald, S., 2012. The use of tacit and explicit knowledge in public health: a qualitative study. Implementation Science, 7(1), p.20.

Lobach, D., Sanders, G.D., Bright, T.J., Wong, A., Dhurjati, R., Bristow, E., Bastian, L., Coeytaux, R., Samsa, G., Hasselblad, V. and Williams, J.W., 2012.Enabling health care decisionmaking through clinical decision support and knowledge management. Evid Rep Technol Assess (Full Rep), 203(203), p.1Y784.

Meihami, B. and Meihami, H., 2014. Knowledge Management a way to gain a competitive advantage in firms (evidence of manufacturing companies). International Letters of Social and Humanistic Sciences, 3, pp.80-91.

Park, C., Vertinsky, I. and Becerra, M., 2015. Transfers of tacit vs. explicit knowledge and performance in international joint ventures: The role of age. International Business Review, 24(1), pp.89-101.

Schoenherr, T., Griffith, D.A. and Chandra, A., 2014. Knowledge management in supply chains: The role of explicit and tacit knowledge. Journal of Business Logistics, 35(2), pp.121-135.

Séin-Echaluce, M.L., Blanco, Á.F., García-Peñalvo, F.J. and Conde, M.Á., 2015, August.A knowledge management system to classify social educational resources within a subject using teamwork techniques.In International Conference on Learning and Collaboration Technologies (pp. 510-519).Springer, Cham.

Silwattananusarn, T. and Tuamsuk, K., 2012. Data mining and its applications for knowledge management: a literature review from 2007 to 2012. arXiv preprint arXiv:1210.2872.

Venkitachalam, K. and Busch, P., 2012. Tacit knowledge: review and possible research directions. Journal of Knowledge Management, 16(2), pp.357-372.

Wang, Z. and Wang, N., 2012. Knowledge sharing, innovation and firm performance. Expert systems with applications, 39(10), pp.8899-8908.