Overview of Knowledge Management

1 Knowledge Management is about using the brain power ofan organization in a systematic and organized manner inorder to achieve efficiencies, ensure competitiveadvantage, and spur innovation. This chapter discussesthe fundamentals of Knowledge Management , itsdefinitions, components, processes, and relevance forhigher education, in general, and institutional research,in FORINSTITUTIONALRESEARCH, no. 113, Spring 2002 Wiley Periodicals, of Knowledge ManagementAndreea M. Serban, Jing LuanIn the early 1990s, corporations coined the concept and movement ofknowledge Management , which is an institutional systematic effort to cap-italize on the cumulative Knowledge that an organization has. Knowledgemanagement is a fast-moving field created by the collision of several others,including human resources, organizational development, change manage-ment, information technology, brand and reputation Management , perfor-mance measurement, and evaluation (Bukowitz and Williams, 1999).

2 Although a fairly young field, Knowledge Management has gainedtremendous popularity very quickly in the business world. Journals dedicatedto this topic include Knowledge Management Magazine, Knowledge ManagementReview,and Knowledge Management World are conferenceseither exclusively dedicated to this field, such as KM World or the KnowledgeManagement Conferences organized by the American Productivity andQuality Center, or prominently featuring Knowledge Management both interms of presentations and vendors, such the annual conferences held byGartner Research Group and EDUCAUSE. Consulting groups both wellestablished with a large client base and small, regionally based have rushedto advertise Knowledge Management as one of their areas of examples include the Gartner Group, the American Productivityand Quality Center, and Klynveld, Peat, Marwick, Goerdeler (KPMG).

3 Knowledge Management presents a significant business to industry expert Ovum (cited in VNU Business Media, 2001),the worldwide Knowledge Management market will be worth $ billionby the year 2004. More specifically, Ovum forecasts that the worldwide mar-ket for Knowledge Management related software will increase from $515million in 1999 to $ billion by 2004. Knowledge Management relatedservices are expected to grow from $ billion in 1999 to $ billion by6 KNOWLEDGEMANAGEMENT2004. Among the Knowledge Management services are those provided bytraining and performance improvement organizations. Are these impressivefigures paralleled by results? A 2001 survey by Reuters finds that 90 percentof companies that deploy a Knowledge Management solution benefit frombetter decision making and 81 percent say that they notice increased pro-ductivity (Malhotra, 2001).

4 Several reasons account for and technologicaldevelopments have led to the emergence and growth of this for Emergence and Growth of KnowledgeManagementReasons for the emergence and growth of this field include the Overload and overwhelms corpo-rations, schools, classrooms, and our minds. Finding what we need to com-plete a task, especially more complex ones, can be time consuming andfrustrating if we do not have access to a well-organized, readily availableinfrastructure that contains the type of information needed. Informationresides in many different sources, some easily accessible, others volatile andhighly personal. As Microsoft founder Bill Gates noted in his presentationat COMDEX Fall 1999: Corporate information today is so hard to find. It skept in folders, or anecdotally understood by people in the company (citedin VNU Business Media, 2001).

5 Gates added, Knowledge workers need toshare things, and need access to the right information at the right time. Thisis so hard today. What is true? Which solution is better? Or what are thesolutions? What we have gained are volumes of unfiltered and unprocessedinformation and what we struggle to find are the time and the ability torespond quickly to ever increasing demands and expectations from ouremployers and clients, whether they are students or faculty or channels bottleneck in ourcomputer networks. We sometimes hear that the Internet access is slowduring peak hours at work because too many of us are searching the Webat the same time. Sometimes the speed with which we can tap into availableinternal data warehouses or transactional operational systems is less thandesirable because too many of us are accessing vast amounts of data, thusputting a significant strain on our systems.

6 If we had the mechanisms to tar-get very specifically the data or information we are looking for, the overallspeed of our networks would be consistently at its best and Skill Segmentation and era, when a single individual mastered many different domains,is long gone. While there are always exceptions to confirm the rule, mostindividuals can now master only one domain of expertise and sometimesonly segments within one domain. It is often the case that the completionof various projects requires access to and corroboration of information frommultiple domains. Having access to the right information, at the right time, Overview OFKNOWLEDGEMANAGEMENT7without necessarily being an expert in all domains involved, would greatlyimprove individual and organizational efficiency and Mobility and average years an employeespends on one career have been shortened from lifelong to ten and now tothree years (United States Department of Labor, 2000).

7 When colleaguesretire or change jobs, they take with them valuable experiences and skillsfor which the institution has paid a premium to search and train. A 2001survey found that while 26 percent of Knowledge in the average organiza-tion is stored on paper and 20 percent digitally, an astonishing 42 percentis stored in employees heads (Malhotra, 2001). Organizations are increas-ingly recognizing that capturing and sharing these experiences and skillssave them money, prevent or reduce interruptions in activities, and enhancetheir overall ability to cope with changes in has always been a main driver for improvementand innovation in the business environment. With the propagation of non-traditional higher education providers and modalities of instructional deliv-ery, such as University of Phoenix and online courses and programs,colleges and universities are increasingly finding themselves competing forstudents much more than they were accustomed to a decade ago.

8 Being ableto anticipate changes in our environments and demands for new programsor courses, and to respond quickly, are becoming prerequisites for howhigher education must operate in order to survive, thrive, and adapt Developments Contributing toEmergence and Growth of Knowledge ManagementWhereas Knowledge Management is not defined by technology, technolo-gies support Knowledge Management (Hildebrand, 1999; Hayward, 2000).Without the advent of powerful and sophisticated hardware and softwaretools, the field of Knowledge Management would have been at most a goodsubject for theoretical lectures and philosophical exercises. Knowledge man-agement processes perform best when enabled by powerful, yet fairly easyto use once implemented, technologies. As discussed throughout this vol-ume, emphasis on technology alone will achieve little progress towardknowledge Management , but even the strongest commitment to knowledgemanagement that is not supported by robust technology will not intersection of the above-mentioned reasons and the fast techno-logical developments of the 1990s has produced an environment conduciveto translating the theoretical foundation of Knowledge Management intopractice.

9 Whereas the fact that Knowledge is power is as old as the humancivilization, having the means to put in place organizationwide systems thatconstantly and systematically capture and capitalize on this power is a fairlyrecent, evolving finding ways to work with Knowledge as an asset, organizations aretransforming Knowledge from an abstract concept to an increasingly tangi-ble and manageable one. This transformation has spawned new conceptsand terminology, thereby strengthening the relationship between informa-tion and technology, as well as developing new processes and approachesto designing information resources and new cultures (VNU Business Media,2001). The remainder of this chapter is dedicated to describing these con-cepts, terminology, processes, and cultures and their applicability to highereducation in general and institutional research in Is Knowledge ?

10 Epistemology is the study of the nature and grounds of Knowledge . Epistemolo-gists reason that Knowledge is justified belief. They contemplate the eter-nal challenge of separating true from false. As Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995)point out: we consider Knowledge as a dynamic human process of justify-ing personal belief toward the truth. There has been a lineage of thisbranch of philosophy that recognized Knowledge as awareness of absoluteand permanent facts. Kantian synthesis, a branch of rationalism and empiri-cism, later developed the notion that Knowledge came from the organiza-tion of perceptual data on the basis of categories, including space, time,objects, and causality. Their theory moved from Plato s view to the subjec-tivity of basic concepts about space and time.