Imagine that you are the manager responsible for e-commerce in your selected e-business. As E-Commerce Manager, you have been asked to investigate Knowledge Management, assess its suitability as a tool to retain key corporate knowledge, and produce a report on these two aspects. Please summarize the key findings of this report in your blog posting this week. Make sure that it is specific to your company and your company’s market sector.

 

Definition  

Knowledge assets are the knowledge when it comes to the markets, products, technologies and organizations, that a business owns or needs to own and which enable its business processes to generate profits, add value, etc. Knowledge management is not only about managing these knowledge assets but managing the processes that act upon the assets. These processes include: developing knowledge; preserving knowledge; using knowledge, and sharing knowledge.

Therefore, Knowledge management involves the identification and analysis of available and required knowledge assets and knowledge asset related processes, and the subsequent planning and control of actions to develop both the assets and the processes so as to fulfill organizational objectives. Early knowledge management technologies included online business yellow pages as expert in locating document management systems. KM technologies grew in the mid-90s.

It is important for Schuh to keep up to date and on top of the business to ensure that they can makae a profit and for the company to grow in value aswell.

 

Explicit and tacit knowledge

·        Knowledge Management - Techniques and tools for capturing and spreading knowledge within an organization.

·        Explicit – the details of processes and procedures. Clear knowledge can be easily detailed in procedural manuals and databases.

·        Tacit – less tangible than clear knowledge, this is familiarity on how to react in circumstances when many different items are involved. It is more difficult to sum up this knowledge, which often is remembered by employees.

 

 Strategies

Knowledge may be accessed at three stages: before, during, or after KM-related activities. Different organizations have tried a number of different ways to gain knowledge, including submission of content and incorporating rewards into performance measurement plans. A lot of controversy exists over whether incentives work or not in this field and no conclusion has been made.

One strategy to KM involves actively managing knowledge. An example of this is, individuals try to explicitly encode their knowledge into a shared knowledge archive, this could be a database, as well as retrieving knowledge they need that other individuals have provided to the archive.

It is important that Schuh have their strategies in place before, during and after the knowledge management system.

 

Motivations

A number of claims exist as to the motivations leading organizations to undertake a KM effort. Typical considerations driving a KM effort include:

 

·        Making available increased knowledge content in the development and provision of products and services

·        Achieving shorter new product development cycles

·        Facilitating and managing innovation and organizational learning

·        Leveraging the expertise of people across the organization

·        Increasing network connectivity between internal and external individuals

·        Managing business environments and allowing employees to obtain relevant insights and ideas appropriate to their work

·        Solving intractable or wicked problems

·        Managing intellectual capital and intellectual assets in the workforce (such as the expertise and know-how possessed by key individuals)

 

Technologies

More recently, development of social computing tools (such as blogs and wikis) have allowed more unstructured, self-governing or ecosystem approaches to the transfer, capture and creation of knowledge, including the development of new forms of communities, networks, or matrixed organisations. However such tools for the most part are still based on text and code, and thus represent explicit knowledge transfer. These tools face challenges in distilling meaningful re-usable knowledge and ensuring that their content is transmissible through diverse channels.