Page 221 - DCAP208_Management Support Systems

Management Support Systems

Notes This concluded that KM activities consist of knowledge identification, knowledge acquisition,
knowledge application, knowledge sharing, knowledge development, knowledge creation,
knowledge preservation and knowledge measurement. The most significant contribution is to
provide a KM activities framework.

Self Assessment

Fill in the blanks:
1. The difference between what the enterprise requires and what it currently has is what is
called the ...................
2. ................... is quite simply the process of acquiring knowledge that is available somewhere.
3. ................... deals with the fact that employees continually apply their knowledge to their
working situation.
4. ................... is a building block which complements knowledge acquisition.
5. ................... is the key focus about creating new knowledge or innovating existing knowledge
for the organization.

6. ................... is to measure the impact and effects after implementing knowledge management
in an organization.

13.2 Knowledge Management Approaches

The Knowledge Capital in the enterprise is an intangible capital, which is not visible in the
organization; its content even remained elusive. One can agree to now say that the content of
that capital is both hidden and scattered in two essential components of the enterprise:

The human and social capital: The quintessence of the knowledge in the enterprise (core
knowledge) is in the head of its employees. It is anyway the ultimate place before its
operational use. It is in a tacit form, and hardly expressible (or even not at all), according
to the adage: “we know more that what we can tell”. This tacit knowledge capital, tightly
linked to the human capital, is at a time collective and individual and lives through
knowledge networks of the organization (knowledge workers) that produce and use a
precious and operational knowledge constantly.
The information capital: Enterprises stored, since decades, huge information masses, that
they stock and distribute with more and more sophisticated information. Employees of
the enterprise constantly use this gigantic system of information for their operational
activity, they acquire information, attach a precise sense in their operational context to
transform it into useful knowledge to their profession. Unfortunately, to find the right
information, at the right moment for the right person becomes a difficult task, regarding
the available amount of information. The potential knowledge is then really buried in
masses of information, and is not easily accessible.

Therefore, managing a knowledge capital is problematic, because of its two-headed character
two-headed human capital/information capital and its character hidden tacit/buried.
To approach this problematic two main approaches are possible:

The first is to face (partially) the hidden character of knowledge, by making it explicit,
either from the tacit knowledge in knowledge networks, either from knowledge buried
in information systems.
The second is to keep to the available knowledge its hidden character (tacit, especially)
and to manage them by managing networks of the knowledge themselves.

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