Knowledge Management: Critical Aspect to Organizational Success

             With 21^st century’s financial meltdown and the growing uncertainty of job insecurity and the supervisory frustration among employees at any level in organizations, managers and those who communicate downwardly should not overlook the knowledge employees have acquired. In truth, managing employee knowledge is very critical to organizational success. Scoring high in knowledge management practices is, therefore, the surest recipe for effectiveness and greater productivity.

 Assuming that knowledge is already somewhere in the organization, the chief important decision an organization faces during functionality is to carefully handle its knowledge management processes. Ideally though, this task consists of two related parts: The first one is the demand-side of knowledge management, locating where the knowledge lies in the hierarchy of organization’s employee chains and managing it to superior performance. This is to first know who owns the knowledge that the organization needs the most and transforming it into a successful organizational asset. In other words, since the fuel of any business is the know-how and those who host it, organizations must do a good bid in establishing a pool of talented yet educated workers for their own survival.

The second part, and the next most important task, is the delivery-side of knowledge management. In securing the owners of the knowledge, the task of managing the knowledge itself comes into play. This is where managers either fail or succeed. But in a perfect world, this isn’t that difficult. It is as simple as the process of keeping knowledge secure, integrating it into an organizational asset, and sharing it with those other stakeholders down the chain. After all, this can form the organization’s intellectual asset in the making. And as Steyn and de Toit argued in their article published in South African Journal of Business Management, a competent organization does this by codifying the knowledge and putting it into repositories for future retrieval. In sum, before managing knowledge workers and the knowledge itself, organizations should accentuate the value of knowledge management processes.

Eventually, organizations exploit knowledge and manage it innovatively to generate efficiency and effectiveness. However, managing knowledge requires knowledgeable personnel and technologically innovative ways to facilitate the process of knowledge management. In short, to better manage its human capital and resources, an organization should skillfully handle its knowledge management strategy thoroughly carefully because knowledge contains in people’s heads.

What's more, it seems that the linear relationship between managing human capital and knowledge management has stronger correlation with organization’s strategic ambition. But the difficulty is how organizations generate, transition, and share information that was already in someone else’s head. This presents magnificent challenges and prospects to businesses wanting to compete in a global arena. In their study, Felin and his colleagues, summarized the concept straightforwardly, “To understand knowledge governance and the associated implications for human capital management fully, we must explore the complementary and seemingly contradictory features of these trends.” This is why the role of managing employees’ knowledge played significantly in producing the best innovations throughout history.

            In conclusion, knowledge management has increasingly been part of every sound business success and economic growth. And organizations, whose market segment relates to information technology, must put special emphasis on both demand- and delivery-side of knowledge management. They should go well beyond acquiring information and sharing it with stakeholders; they must filter and classify information time and again for future dependability and reliability. There should be an aggregated system that hosts organization’s information. To put it succinctly, knowledge management is the process through which organizations generate value from their intellectual and knowledge-based asset.