KMagellan – The Knowledge Explorer

Benefits of Knowledge Management

Knowledge is like a fuel and energy source for business, a power source. Imagine the use of other power sources such as electricity or gasoline. What are the uses? What are the potential Benefits? The possibilities are many.  To list a few: effective knowledge management pays off in fewer mistakes, less redundancy, quicker problem solving, and better decision making, reduced research development costs, increased worker independence, enhanced customer relations, and improved service. Further, some benefits of KM for the enterprise are (not all are possible to realize simultaneously):

¨      Productivity and efficiency

¨      Client collaboration

¨      Competitive advantage, including market visibility as a high-tech firm

¨      Ability to direct work to skilled specialists

¨      Knowledge sharing, skill development, and training

¨      Consistency of work product across offices or practice areas

¨      Faster delivery times

¨      Quality control

¨      Significant reduction in time & effort for retrieval of documents

Each company should determine the specific goals for its knowledge management program, because unless the goals are defined, it is impossible to measure success.

Knowledge management (KM) is a process for optimizing the effective application of intellectual capital to achieve objectives. In an organizational setting, this would mean a systematic approach to getting an organization to make the best possible use of knowledge in implementing its mission, broadly viewed as either sustainable competitive advantage or long-term high performance. It involves blending a company’s internal and external information and turning it into actionable knowledge by managing knowledge flow, Knowledge Life Cycle – acquisition, production, and integration of knowledge throughout an organization. KM is a multi-disciplined approach to achieving organizational objectives by making best use of knowledge. It involves the design, review and implementation of both social and technological processes to improve the application of knowledge, in the collective interest of stakeholders. A few reasons why many companies are adopting knowledge management are:

¨      80% or more of an Company’s knowledge remains in the minds of its people [TACIT Knowledge]  

¨      Many past successes and failures are never recorded

¨      People who do not have knowledge of the past tend to duplicate effort, waste time & incur cost by trial and error

¨      Using knowledge, people learn and improve work practices

¨      Sharing breeds one-ness and teamwork

¨      Everyone speaks the same language and understands each other better