Global Knowledge Management and Economy - Nik Zafri

The Star Global Malaysians Forum - Posted: 28 February 2006 at 7:12pm

Queries by e-mail

(note : I have done some editing in order to protect certain information)

anonymous wrote:

1.How do you define knowledge management (KM)? How is knowledge management different from information management?

I can answer you from the organizational point of view. I will skip the 'philosophies'.

Knowledge Management is simply defined as - capturing, organizing, and storing KNOWLEDGE and EXPERIENCE of individual workers and groups within an organization and making this information available to others in the organization.

The difference of KM and IM is that IM is the mechanism to KM. IM (again in the organizational viewpoint) is defined as the entire process of defining, evaluating, protecting, and distributing DATA within an organization. (IM nowadays is very much related to ICT)

Note : Data - tacit (raw) and explicit (having undergoing finalisation process throughout the 'pipeline')

KM cannot function without IM as IM cannot function without ICT.

KM as I also see it (personally) is another evolution of TQM due to their similarities but with ICT and IM around, it is now known as KM.

anonymous wrote:

2. Do you agree that besides managerial and generic skills, KM managers need to have the technical or functional skills (specific KM-related skills to support knowledge processing or activities such as knowledge sharing, codification, mapping, auditing, etc...) to perform their KM roles? Why?

AGREED 100%. Technical is a MUST in the quest to becoming K-Workers. In the organizational point of view, competency or competent worker is actually related to 'having necessary qualifications, experience and technical skills' where these elements should be 'customized to the needs of the organization/industry' (generic)and NOT vice versa.

I will have to stress the fact that all Managers are KM Managers for their own/respective unit, department or section otherwise customization will not take place effectively. Of course, in some organizations, they have KM coordinators - usually parked under HR and/or IT Department.

The coordinator's basic functions is to perform IM processing and if he/she is from IT department, they need to find some solutions to 'e-enable' these processes. There are big to small scale meetings (SGA oriented) will take place usually to brainstorm on certain information and identify critical data to be garnered out.

The members of the meeting comes from various departments usually to choose the process owner' of such information going to be discussed. This information will eventually be turned into 'explicit' from 'tacit' having achieving unanimous agreement. Finally, a process flow will be drawn up and if there is a need to 'e-enable' the flow, then IT will come into the picture. The 'committee' headed by the 'process owner(s) will feed the information to IT and IT will do the rest - making things 'go a lil bit' faster - for example - data mining/capturing, classifying, coding, interface, real-time data for fast decision making.

anonymous wrote:

3. While performing your KM roles, have you ever experienced lacking some KM related skills? that are the factors viewed as contributors to such situations?

So far so good. The only setbacks that would likely to appear if :

a) I do not do a proper research to understand what sort of industry that I'm in (which I always do)
b) Cooperation from the 'target' is not given, (resisting to change)
c) office politics - bureaucracy
d) no transparency

That would be all for now..hope the above helps.