Question

Knowledge can be thought of as the combined result of a person’s experiences and the information they
possess. Discuss the benefits and the types of applications relating to Knowledge management.
2.1 State the benefits of knowledge management (10)
2.2 List and provide a brief description of knowledge management applications.

Answer 1

2.1) The benefits of knowledge management are:   

a)Enabling better and faster decision making:

Delivering relevant information at the time of need through structure, search, subscription, syndication, and support, a knowledge management environment can provide the basis for making good decisions. Collaboration brings the power of large numbers, diverse opinions, and varied experience to bear when decisions need to be made.

b)Making it easy to find relevant information and resources

When we will in the condition with a need to respond to a customer, solve a problem, analyze trends, assess markets, benchmark against peers, understand competition, create new offerings, plan strategy, and to think critically, you typically look for information and resources to support these activities. If it is easy and fast to find what you need when you need it, you can perform all of these tasks efficiently.

c)Reusing ideas, documents, and expertise

Once we  develope an effective process, we should ensure that others use the process each time a similar requirement arises. If someone has written a document or created a presentation that addresses a recurring need, it should be used in all future similar situations. When members of organization have figured out how to solve a common problem, know how to deliver a recurring service, or have invented a new product,  that same solution is needed, service, and product to be replicated as much as possible. Just as the recycling of materials is good for the environment, reuse is good for organizations because it minimizes rework, prevents problems, saves time, and accelerates progress.

d)Avoiding redundant effort

No one likes to spend time doing something over again. But they do so all the time for a variety of reasons. Avoiding duplication of effort saves time and money, keeps employee morale up, and streamlines work. By not spending time reinventing the wheel, one can have more time to invent something new.

e)Avoiding making the same mistakes twice

Knowledge management allows us to share lessons learned, not only about successes, but also about failures. In order to do so, we must have a culture of trust, openness, and reward for willingness to talk about what we have done wrong. The potential benefits are enormous.

f) Taking advantage of existing expertise and experience

Teams benefit from the individual skills and knowledge of each member. The more complementary the expertise of the team members, the greater the power of the team. In large organizations, there are people with widely-varying capabilities and backgrounds, and there should be a benefit from this. But as the number of people increases, it becomes more difficult for each individual to know about everyone else.

g) Communicating important information widely and quickly

Almost everyone today is an information worker, either completely or partially. We all need information to do our jobs effectively, but we also suffer from information overload from an increasing variety of sources. It is hard to get information that is targeted, useful, and timely without drowning in a sea of email, having to visit hundreds of web sites, or reading through tons of printed material. Knowledge management helps address this problem through personalized portals, targeted subscriptions, RSS feeds, tagging, and enterprise search engines.

h)Promoting standard, repeatable processes and procedures

If standard processes and procedures have been defined, they should always be followed. This allows employees to learn how things are done, leads to predictable and high-quality results, and enables large organizations to be consistent in how work is performed. By providing a process for creating, storing, communicating, and using standard processes and procedures, employees will be able to use them routinely.

i)Providing methods, tools, templates, techniques, and examples

Methods, tools, templates, techniques, and examples are the building blocks supporting repeatable processes and procedures. Using these consistently streamlines work, improves quality, and ensures compatibility across the organization.

j) Making scarce expertise widely available

If there is a resource who is in great demand due to having a skill that is in short supply, knowledge management can help make that resource available to the entire organization. Ways of doing so include community discussion forums, training events, ask the expert systems, recorded presentations, white papers, blogs, podcasts and videos.

k)Showing customers how knowledge is used for their benefit

In competitive situations, it is important to be able to differentiate yourself from other firms. Demonstrating to potential and current customers that you have widespread expertise and have ways of bringing it to bear for their benefit can help convince them to start or continue doing business with you. Conversely, failure to do so could leave you vulnerable to competitors who can demonstrate their knowledge management capabilities and benefits.

2.2) Knowledge management applications:

• Intranet Search engine
• Entity extraction
• Document classification based on customized taxonomy
• Customer feedback analysis

  

Intranet Search engine:

Finding what we need inside a company is not always easy. Company intranets are an excellent starting point for making information available, but not every search box is equal. Accessing information often depends on users knowing where something is located. One of the most important knowledge management applications, therefore, is a strong, semantic search engine that can reach all of your enterprise content, and retrieve the precise items that we are looking for—marketing reports, product data sheets, customer information, patent records, etc with the same speed and effectiveness that you would expect from a typical internet search.

Entity extraction:

Identifying entities contained in content—people, places, locations, organizations, as well ascustomized organizational entities— can provide a useful view of unknown data sets by immediately revealing the who, what and where contained in information. Entity extraction is an essential knowledge management application that helps transform unstructured data to data that is structured, and therefore machine readable and available for standard processing that can be applied for a number of business activities.

Document classification based on customized taxonomy:

Simply storing knowledge of company is useless, Effective enterprise search, therefore, starts with deploying classification and taxonomy development tools rooted in an understanding of language. The taxonomy must reflect organization’s unique vocabulary—the acronyms, products and project code names that your internal users know by heart—in order to be truly useful; a full understanding of meaning can help distinguish between different contextual uses of information. Both are essential for delivering precise information for search and other applications.

Customer feedback analysis:

The opinions expressed online by your customers and users contain valuable insight about your companies, brands, competitors, products and services. Being able to analyze the signals and feedback left by consumers on social media, forums, reviews or classic survey mechanisms requires truly understanding what is being expressed and how.