Goals and Objectives of Knowledge Management
Knowledge management involves a strategic commitment to improving the organization’s effectiveness, as well as to improving its opportunity enhancement. The goal of knowledge management as a process is to improve the organization’s ability to execute its core processes more efficiently.
Davenport et al. (1998) describes four broad objectives of knowledge management systems in practice:
¨ create knowledge repository
¨ improve knowledge assets
¨ enhance the knowledge environment
¨ manage knowledge as an asset
The key to knowledge management is capturing intellectual assets for the tangible benefits for the organization. As such, imperatives of knowledge management are to:
¨ transform knowledge to add value to the processes and operations of the business
¨ leverage knowledge strategic to business to accelerate growth and innovation
¨ Use knowledge to provide a competitive advantage for the business.
The aim of knowledge management is to continuously improve an organization’s performance through the improvement and sharing of organizational knowledge throughout the organization (i.e., the aim is to ensure the organization has the right knowledge at the right time and place). Knowledge management is the set of proactive activities to support an organization in creating, assimilating, disseminating, and applying its knowledge. Knowledge management is a continuous process to understand the organization’s knowledge needs, the location of the knowledge, and how to improve the knowledge.