CAN ORGANISATIONAL KNOWLEDGE BE MANAGED

Management of organisational knowledge is a very important aspect for an organisation, before the discussion about it, i would like to deliver about what knowledge means to organisation. By considering the present corporate world, most of the organisations started using knowledge in an efficient manner that tend to be more of value and resulted as success as the time past. Stewart (1997) states that knowledge is increasingly are being recognised to be an most important resource in any organisation and also have become the key differentiating factor in business. At the present stage, innovations and responsiveness have taken the place of being a major source of competitive differentiation, hence human components have been as knowledge creator, decision makers, and sense makers as per the statement of (Choo,1998, Davenport and Prusak, 1998, Nonaka1999) of knowledge have impacted on the firm’s valuation which has driven the knowledge to be viewed as asset that should be managed carefully, and this asset represents properties of the mind and are now personified in people and process, and also in the objects like trade mark, patents and copyrights(Brooks,1997), as the continuation the necessity of managing knowledge had led to an explosion or an expansion of knowledge management initiation within the organisation(Edvison & Malone,1997:Stewart,1997).
Now, let me start with the discussion about , can knowledge be managed..as large number of organisations are implementing or starting with knowledge management initiatives. the strategic motivations exists for the purpose of managing knowledge, which implies to the speed of change, shift to service based economy and as of today everything in a organisation are being done in an organised manner, due to the implementation of much improved technologies , the organisations know how to manage their knowledge(Lank,1997).it is being a belief of many, that knowledge can be managed with the help of technologies like internet and intranet that globalises the knowledge sharing.
Knowledge has been classified in to two types according to Nonako(1994) and Polanyi(1966), namely, Tacit and Explicit. To look in to the management of these two types of knowledge in the organisation, explicit knowledge is much easier to be managed, as it can be easily articulated and codified, on my view, organisations always helps to deal with tacit knowledge as it is being considered as the important part of the knowledge in organisation, however most of the time is spent with explicit, as the reason for this being the difficulty in expressing the tacit knowledge, hence the ability of codifying tacit knowledge becomes a challenge at times. Organisations are now well equipped with technologies in order to assimilate information at instance and convert then in to competitive advantages, many of the organisations have sufficient technical facilities to manage explicit knowledge efficiently, for example: data ware house and data mining.
Practical implication
It is now well understood according to the details stated above, that knowledge can be managed, in addition to it, the organisations are equipped with technologies to manage knowledge that provides capabilities to record, organise and recall information according to the operational needs, however to make an employee in the process and illicit from them a codification of tacit knowledge in an informatically usable way becomes a challenge, it becomes a bit difficult to bring out the tacit knowledge, however couldn’t be left as it is, for which there should be some solutions like encouraging employees in sharing knowledge by providing incentives and hence the tacit knowledge could also be managed in an efficient manner.
References
[1]Stewart, Thomas A. (1997). Intellectual Capital:The New Wealth of Organizations, New York:Currency Doubleday.
[2]Choo, C.W. (1998). The Knowing Organization:How Organizations Use Information to Construct Meaning, Create Knowledge, andMake Decisions, New York: Oxford UniversityPress.
[3]Davenport, T., and Prusak, L. (1998). Working Knowledge: How Organizations Manage What They Know, Boston: Harvard BusinessSchool Press.
[4]Brooking, A. (1997), "The Management of Intellectual Capital," Long Range Planning,Vol. 30, No. 3
[5]Edvinsson, L., and Malone, M.S. (1997).Intellectual Capital: Realizing Your Company's True Value by Finding Its Hidden Brainpower,New York: Harper Business.
[6]Nonaka, I.N. (1994). "A Dynamic Theory of Organizational Knowledge Creation," Organization Science, Vol. 5, No. 1, pp.14-37.Stewart, Thomas A. (1997). Intellectual Capital: