Madelein Botha (2012126252)

The value of knowledge management

It is very important to remember that information is not knowledge. Only what you do with the information after you have gathered can be seen as knowledge. Knowledge is power in an organization, but that knowledge has little value unless it can be easily accessed by its employees and put into practice.

The objective of this blog is to help empower and motivate all sales leaders to use knowledge management in their organizations. Knowledge management will help the sales organization to achieve higher and more sustainable sales results. It is first very important to understand what knowledge management is also the category’s in which it is placed. Then there are two key aspects that help give a perspective of what knowledge management is. Lastly the stages of knowledge management will be explained to help give a practical example of how sales managers can implement it in their organization.

What is knowledge management?

Knowledge management is an approach that helps identify, capture, evaluate and share all of the organizations information with all the necessary people in the organization. This information can include databases, documents, policies, procedures and previous expertise and experiences of individual workers.

Knowledge integration is very important throughout the value network. This means that sharing information across the organization with all employees is very important, but before that there is also a very important step that needs to be completed. This is known as value creation, where customers co-create value through their interactions with the organization. The organization should then learn from these customers what they value and also how that value can be created. This information should then be transferred to all the relevant employees and organizations so that they can also understand customer value. This knowledge can lead to competitive advantage and increase sales.

Knowledge management can be categorized in three different categories namely:

Explicit: This means information or knowledge that is set in tangible form.

Tactic: This means the hidden knowledge, experiences and skills employees possess.

This shows that there is explicit knowledge that is tangible that you can use in your organization to help improve sales like databases, documents and procedures. Tactic knowledge is one of the most important ones, because this is the knowledge, experiences and skills of the employees and they use these skills in working with explicit knowledge to help achieve higher and sustainable sales results.

Two key aspects that give perspective to knowledge management

The first aspect explains that knowledge cannot be objectified as a whole, because the experiences, expertise, skills, knowledge and meaning of things are held in the mind of the knower (the employee in this case). This is tactic knowledge that employees possess and its something that is not tangible it is human intellect.

The second aspect explains that knowledge depending on the context it is used in can have different meanings. Knowledge is logical and understandable way of problem solving or task completion. This is where knowledge is embedded in a context of a system for a specific purpose like to help solve a complex problem.

The cycle of knowledge management

Fig. 1.1 An integrated knowledge management cycle

First stage: Knowledge capture and creation

Knowledge capturing is done by the employees in the organization or created by the employees. This knowledge is the assessed by the manager, other employees and sometimes people outside of the organization. The knowledge is assessed to help determine the validity of the knowledge captured.

Second stage: Knowledge sharing and dissemination

Knowledge sharing is encouraged in the organization. This means that information is shared or disseminated throughout the organization when the need arises. Information is shared with other departments and employees.

Third stage: Knowledge acquisition and application

The knowledge is then used by the people of the organization and also updated throughout the use of the data to help keep the information relevant. This will ensure that all data is useful and nit out of date.

Implementing and maintaining a knowledge management system takes time and money, but the results can be very impressive and this can help to minimizes unnecessary risks that the organization takes. Organizations and managers who implements this system add to their bottom line through faster cycle times, better decision making and greater use of solutions that are tried and tested.

References

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Durham, Mary. (2004). Three Critical Roles for Knowledge Management Workspaces. In M.E.D. Koenig & T. K. Srikantaiah (Eds.), Knowledge Management: Lessons Learned: What Works and What Doesn't. (pp. 23-36). Medford NJ: Information Today, for The American Society for Information Science and Technology.

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Koenig, M.E.D. (1992). The Information Environment and the Productivity of Research. In H. Collier (Ed.), Recent Advances in Chemical Information, (pp. 133-143). London: Royal Society of Chemistry. Mazzie, Mark. (2003). Personal Communication.

McInerney, Claire. M and Koenig, Michael E. D., (2011), Knowledge Management (KM) processes in Organizations: Theoretical Foundations and Practice , Morgan and Claypool.

Mohapatra, S., Satpathy, A. and Agrawal, A. (2016). Designing Knowledge Management-Enabled Business. Springer International publishers, pp.14, 15.