Knowledge Management is the process of capturing, distributing, and effectively using knowledge. Managing the environment and the organizational/institutional and Individual/personal processes that assure the application or use of knowledge produces the results that provide value for stakeholders
The concept and the terminology of KM sprouted within the management consulting community. When the Internet arose, those organizations quickly realized that an intranet, an in-house subset of the Internet, was a wonderful tool with which to make information accessible and to share it among the geographically dispersed units of their organizations. Not surprisingly, they quickly realized that in building tools and techniques such as dashboards, expertise locators, and best practice (lessons learned) databases, they had acquired an expertise which was in effect a new product that they could market to other organizations, particularly to organizations which were large, complex, and dispersed. However, a new product needs a name, and the name that emerged was Knowledge Management.
Another major development is the expansion of KM beyond the 20th century vision of KM as the organization’s knowledge as described in the Gartner Group definition of KM. Increasingly KM is seen as ideally encompassing the whole bandwidth of information and knowledge likely to be useful to an organization, including knowledge external to the organization—knowledge emanating from vendors, suppliers, customers, etc., and knowledge originating in the scientific and scholarly community, the traditional domain of the library world. Looked at in this light, KM extends into environmental scanning and competitive intelligence.
Hence, the Knowledge Management (KM) community uses the term “tacit knowledge” not only to identify the usage of specific knowledge but also the implicit knowledge which is obviously the knowledge that comes from people’s head. The category of explicit, implicit, and tacit is not easy to notice but maybe important and more useful in education.
By: Desiree T. Perey | Teacher III | Cataning Elementary School
