Knowledge management is the plannin

Knowledge management is the planning, organizing, motivating, and controlling of people, proc- esses and systems in the organization to ensure that its knowledge-related assets are improved and effectively employed. Knowledge-related assets include knowledge in the form of printed documents such as patents and manuals, knowledge stored in electronic repositories such as a “best-practices” database, employees’ knowledge about the best way to do their jobs, knowledge that is held by teams who have been working on focused problems and knowledge that is embed- ded in the organization’s products, processes and relationships.
The processes of KM involve knowledge acquisition, creation, refinement, storage, transfer, sharing, and utilization. The KM function in the organization operates these processes, develops methodologies and systems to support them, and motivates people to participate in them.
The goals of KM are the leveraging and improvement of the organization’s knowledge assets to effectuate better knowledge practices, improved organizational behaviors, better deci- sions and improved organizational performance.
Although individuals certainly can personally perform each of the KM processes, KM is largely an organizational activity that focuses on what managers can do to enable KM’s goals to be achieved, how they can motivate individuals to participate in achieving them and how they can create social processes that will facilitate KM success.
Social processes include communities of practice – self-organizing groups of people who share a common interest – and expert networks – networks that are established to allow those with less expertise to contact those with greater expertise. Such social processes are necessary because while knowledge initially exists in the mind of an individual, for KM to be successful, knowledge must usually be transmitted through social groups, teams and networks. Therefore, KM processes are quite people-intensive, and less technology-intensive than most people might believe, although a modern knowledge-enabled enterprise must support KM with appropriate information and communications technology (King, 2 008).