An integration of thoughts on knowledge management

The last decade has seen an increased focus on knowledge creation and knowledge deployment in organizations. Broadly, this stream of thought suggests that organizations should focus on better utilizing their intellectual capacity by improving knowledge flows among members. The goal is achieving a competitive advantage via effective knowledge deployment. In fact, the influence of the dynamic global environment and rapid advances in information technology during the last decade gave rise to the recognition that knowledge is the only resource that can facilitate a sustained competitive advantage. Perhaps such a notion is too aggressive in stating the value of knowledge vis-à-vis other assets for organizations, but even the most skeptical business professionals and scholars would agree that we have moved from an agricultural to an industrial to now a knowledge society. In essence, an organization's value includes more than the financial statistics that are typically outlined in the annual report. Instead, today organizations operate in a fast-cycle-time environment, where having the right knowledge at the right time and in the right format creates an important intangible asset. Such ‘knowledge assets’ are not measurable via traditional means, if at all, as implied by their intangibility. Knowledge is broadly defined as credible information that is of potential value to an organization. On the inbound side of the knowledge management (KM) process (i.e., knowledge creation), the focus is on generation and dissemination of information, developing a shared understanding of the information, filtering shared understandings into degrees of potential value, and storing valuable wisdom within the confines of an accessible organizational mechanism. A critical part of the inbound KM process is the transformation of information into knowledge, a phenomenon that takes place at various places in the process but is the most pronounced at the shared understanding and filtering stages.