Knowledge Management is about making the right knowledge available to the right people. It is about making sure that an organization can learn, and that it will be able to retrieve and use its knowledge assets in current applications as they are needed. Knowledge creation is often perceived as a separate discipline and generally falls under innovation management. Knowledge management is important to organizations and companies because it can help the company be popular by making the company or organization successful. Knowledge management is a rule that can help individual, people, teams in the organization or communities more systematic and to achieve the goals.
Many companies and organization nowadays need employees that have good knowledge management skills because employees that have good knowledge management skills can help the company or organization success. Employees with effective knowledge management should dramatically reduce costs. Employees with effective knowledge management should also dramatically increase the speed of response as a direct result of better knowledge access and application. These are how effective management will improve the excellence of the corporation.
a) Dramatically reduce costs
b) Provide potential to expand and grow
c) Increase our value and/or profitability
d) Improve our products and services
e) Respond faster
There are two types of knowledge management which are Explicit Knowledge and Tacit Knowledge. For Explicit Knowledge is formalized and codified, and is sometimes referred to as know-what. It is therefore fairly easy to identify, store, and retrieve. This is the type of knowledge most easily handled by KMS, which are very effective at facilitating the storage, retrieval, and modification of documents and texts. From a managerial perspective, the greatest challenge with explicit knowledge is similar to information. It involves ensuring that people have access to what they need; that important knowledge is stored; and that the knowledge is reviewed, updated, or discarded and for Tacit Knowledge refers to intuitive, hard to define knowledge that is largely experience based. Because of this, tacit knowledge is often context dependent and personal in nature. It is hard to communicate and deeply rooted in action, commitment, and involvement. Tacit knowledge is also regarded as being the most valuable source of knowledge, and the most likely to lead to breakthroughs in the organization (Wellman 2009). Gamble & Blackwell (2001) link the lack of focus on tacit knowledge directly to the reduced capability for innovation and sustained competitiveness.
There are many benefits and why knowledge management is important for the companies and organizations. The company or organization that has employees with good knowledge management skills will help the organization or company enable better and faster decision making by delivering relevant information at the time of need through structure, search, subscription, syndication, and support, a knowledge management environment can provide the basis for making good decisions. They can also avoid redundant effort no one likes to spend time doing something over again. But they do so all the time for a variety of reasons. Avoiding duplication of effort saves time and money, keeps employee morale up, and streamlines work. By not spending time reinventing the wheel, you can have more time to invent something new. The employees with good knowledge management skills can also take advantages of existing expertise and experience because Teams benefit from the individual skills and knowledge of each member. The more expertise of the people in the team, the greater the power of the team is. In large organizations, there are people with widely-varying capabilities and backgrounds, and there should be a benefit from this. But as the number of people increases, it becomes more difficult for each individual to know about everyone else. So even though there are people with knowledge who could help other people, they don't know about each other. Communicating is also important for organizations and knowledge management can help the employees communicate widely and quickly. Almost everyone today is an information worker, either completely or partially. We all need information to do our jobs effectively, but we also suffer from information overload from an increasing variety of sources.
In conclusion, there are many importance and benefits for knowledge management towards the organization and it is something that an organization needs to have. So, in the present or the future it is very important for an organization to have employees with good knowledge management skills.