Believe it or not, knowledge management (KM) is a key discipline that one must learn in the following fields:

• Business administration
• Information science
• Information systems
• Library science, AND
• Management

As such, knowledge management is a discipline that demonstrates the processes of creating, sharing, using, and managing organizational knowledge and information. Since it uses knowledge to its advantage, KM is often described as a multidisciplinary approach to achieve organizational objectives in various fields (like the ones mentioned).

So, if you’re looking to learn about knowledge management, or want to brush up on your skills, then check out these 5 books!

1. Knowledge Retention: Strategies And Solutions – Jay Liebowitz

“Jay Liebowitz focuses on the knowledge retention part of knowledge management,” says Richard Green, a writer at Assignment Help and UKWritings. “Knowledge retention has to do with managerial initiatives that handle the assessing and retaining of the most critical knowledge within a company. With loss of employees from any circumstance in mind, KR is crucial in knowledge management, or KM.”

2. Knowledge Management – Paul Gamble & John Blackwell

Paul Gamble and John Blackwell team up to write this definitive guide on KM. In this book, the authors present readers with logical and methodical theories, while including the following:

• Examples
• Stories
• Quotes, etc.

With the theories and concepts demonstrated in the book, readers can implement these strategies in their real-life KM projects and organizations.

However, the most important part – the meat – of the book comes from the authors looking at both knowledge and KM in full depth. As both entities are put into focus, readers are taken through many elements that make the relationship between the two outside the firm (or business or organization). When doing so, the book keeps its human focus while considering technological elements.

3. The Power Of KM: Harnessing The Extraordinary Value Of Knowledge Management – Brent N. Hunter

While this book serves as an introduction to KM, Brent N. Hunter still pleases readers with the clear and concise basics of KM. From step-by-step strategies to comprehensive and universal ones, KM can be implemented in any organization.

Hunter suggests that KM is helpful in the following scenarios:

KM can bring enrichment to a business or organization.
KM can help optimize your personal life.
KM can also optimize any and all levels of society. AND
When used worldwide, KM can be extremely powerful alongside regular knowledge.

4. Knowledge Management in Theory and Practice – Kimiz Dalkir

“With knowledge management, there are theoretical aspects to consider,” says Arthur Bowman, a management expert at Revieweal and Essay Services. “Kimiz Dalkir’s book shows you how to use various techniques for knowledge capture, such as road maps, action learning, and so on. Instead of heavily relying on case studies and personal experiences to fully demonstrate KM, this book gives readers tools and instructions on how to make this discipline work for them.”

With that said, Dalkir’s book will cover the following essential elements of KM:

Knowledge application
Knowledge management strategy
Knowledge management tools
Knowledge sharing
Organizational culture

5. Knowledge Management – Shelda Debowski

Finally, Shelda Debowski presents a detailed overview of KM in her book. In Knowledge Management, the author explores the concept of KM from a leadership role and or a strategic management perspective, thus demonstrating the process of designing and introducing KM in a company or organization. Based on this focus – which increases as the book progress – KM has become a thing in the business community and education, thus creating a framework for those wanting to implement this strategic approach. As you can see, this framework is driven by people, not machines.

Another thing that the book talks about is how KM affect the inner workings of an organization. The very essence of KM is (and should be) based on the following:

• Strong leadership
• Strategic management, AND
• Effectively managed service

You’ll then seeing the benefits of collecting, organizing and sharing the knowledge base of your workforce, as a leader (or related role). In short, when it comes to being a leader, or having some form of leadership role in your company, KM helps you not only track your employees’ knowledge bank, but also helps you create and maintain a knowledge culture in that same environment.

Conclusion

So, there you have it!

Knowledge management is essential for business practices, leadership roles, and other important roles in various industries. So, if you’re craving more knowledge in knowledge management, or if you’re just diving into the world of KM, then check out these 5 books. Happy reading!

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The Healthcare industry is a knowledge driven industry and depends heavily on availability of updated trainings, health services, innovative and clinical knowledge to solve problems and provide best possible healthcare, innovate, and achieve excellence in the field.

A well-defined Knowledge Management (KM) framework is critical in healthcare organizations to achieve this goal. Knowledge Management is all about connecting people to people and knowledge enabling them to achieve strategic objectives such as innovation, competitive edge, continuous learning, and improvement.

Let’s see below why a KM framework is vital for healthcare organizations.

Empower decision making capabilities: In the digital age, everyone is constantly bombarded with new information. Healthcare professionals need to make informed choices all the time to make critical decisions that might be lifesaving, however, they might feel handicapped if the information is not streamlined and accessible on the go and round the clock. A healthcare Knowledge management system can help with the flow and accessibility of information that can enable doctors to research valuable information regarding symptoms and medical issues that can make life for patients better.

Prevent medical errors by protecting knowledge: Like any other field, healthcare is also highly competitive. As employees leave or are laid off, their knowledge of medical procedures of best practices in their specific field of specialization is lost with the employee, which creates a knowledge gap and room for errors which can be disastrous in the healthcare industry. The healthcare KM solutions can standardize all medical procures, best practices and provide easy access to the required trainings. This ensures that all required knowledge stays and is accessible on the go to everyone even if a person leaves thus reducing the risk of mistakes due to lack of necessary knowledge.

Encourage upskilling: Medical is one field that is continuously evolving with new medical procedures, drugs research and trials. To provide optimal healthcare and medical advice, the medical students cannot rely on the knowledge they learnt during medical studies. They need to constantly evolve and upskill themselves.  The healthcare organizations by establishing a KM framework can encourage sharing knowledge, best practices, learnings, industry research and developments that can be accessed by all to upskill and learn from others.

Collaboration with other experts:  The health care system is one of the most complex systems that we encounter in society (Anderson & McDaniel, 2000; Orr & Sankaran, 2007; Re-inhardt, Hussey, & Anderson, 2004); it requires collaboration with people in different healthcare domains to provide best healthcare to every individual. With medical records, going digital, it is much easier for doctors to share, search and discuss records which is a concern for many because of the threat to patient /doctor confidentiality.
However, a KM system enable you to capture, and share symptoms, medical condition or any other helpful information while keeping the identity anonymous. This makes easier to share life-saving knowledge without compromising the patient’s privacy.

There is ample evidence to support how a KM framework can help healthcare organizations and professionals improve quality of care of the patients and save lives. The setting up of a KM framework in healthcare organizations is no longer a choice, it is imperative to make more-informed choices and improve patient care, which is the ultimate goal of healthcare industry.

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The main goal of knowledge management is to improve an organization's efficiency and save knowledge within the company.

Knowledge management is an essential and conscious process within an organization. It has to do with the definition, retention, sharing, structuring of knowledge, and employee experience within the organization. With knowledge management, it is easy to improve work efficiency within the organization and retain knowledge.

In short words, knowledge management refers to how you train your employees and how they learn within the organization. Knowledge is created, audited, shared in a manner that ensures growth and effectiveness in the organization. Knowledge management also ensures that employees within the organization are knowledge seekers.

If knowledge management is successful in an organization, it will help the growth of the organization. This way, employees with specialized knowledge won’t leave the company void of their experience when they go to other companies or retire. Also, other employees will be able to use this knowledge in their presence or absence. This will also create a better awareness of the situation and opens the door for organizational learning and improvement.

Types of Knowledge

There are different types of knowledge, and when it comes to knowledge management, you have to consider them. The kind of knowledge determines the ease of sharing.

Two different types of knowledge can be discussed within the framework of knowledge management.

●      Explicit Knowledge

This type of knowledge can be taught and codified easily. This involves simple things like mathematical equations or changing a printer's toner.

●      Tacit Knowledge

This type of knowledge is not as easy to package or share as explicit knowledge, as it is more intuitive. Understanding body language and innovative thinking are good examples of tacit knowledge.

Reasons for Knowledge Management within Organizations

The decision-making ability and increase in work efficiency of an organization are some of the reasons why knowledge management is important. You have to build a smart workforce capable of making quick and informed decisions for the company’s good. This is how to ensure information is retained within your organization. Also, this ensures that you can easily foster innovation in your company. It reduces employee turnover and is also beneficial for your customers.

Year after year, we see knowledge management becoming more important within the business setting. The increased competitiveness of the marketplace makes knowledge management even more critical as you’re able to keep your knowledge and experience and remain ahead of the curve. With a good knowledge management strategy, you will be able to spot problems and deal with innovations and new information very decisively.

A few other reasons for knowledge management within an organization are as follows:

●      The need to retain knowledge within the organization due to the retirement of essential and experienced personnel

●      An acquisition or merger might be the apparent need to codify knowledge and encourage knowledge sharing among the different teams.

●      A recruitment drive that proves the importance of knowledge management in training new staff

Best practices for improving knowledge management

• Decision making: decentralized vs. centralized

The discussion on whether to centralize or centralized decision making is an important one for company executives. Emphasizing centralized, corporate, and hierarchical structures within the organization can negatively affect the executive’s ability to exert changes in the organization.

Meanwhile, a decentralized structure may help improve managerial and departmental interactions. Centralization of leadership may affect the opportunity for the growth of relationships among departments, business units, and managers.

In order be more effective, company execs have to reshape the organization’s structure. This means that the organization’s command center can pass information across a decentralized manner while being organic instead of through a centralized, hierarchical command center.

Another advantage of the decentralized structure is the power shift in decision-making down to the lowest levels. This would inspire the organization members to be creative and innovative with ideas and implement them as well. This won’t happen with centralized structures in which interdepartmental communications and the exchange of knowledge are inhibited.

• Knowledge Management and IT

There is no doubt that knowledge management signified an improvement in the organizational performance of a business. Many business scholars already affirm that knowledge management boosts an organization's performance through innovation, learning opportunities, quality of services and products, customer satisfaction, and increased sales. If the organization’s structure doesn’t fully favor knowledge management, company executives won’t be able to effectively manage the organization’s knowledge so that they can improve the organization's performance. In this case, the organization is at risk of losing its position within the industry and becoming obsolete.

In order to successfully ensure knowledge management within your organization, information technology is critical. This is because it facilitates communication and the flow of knowledge. IT can help you realize how effective your implementation of knowledge management is and how the employees have associated it with the use of IT, systems, and software to improve strategic decision-making. Company executives need to implement IT for the organization’s knowledge management by hiring IT professionals and ensuring that they get enough budgetary allocations to ensure the organization's sharing and utilization of knowledge.

All over the world, business executives have realized that to create the best atmosphere for growth and learning in their organizations, and then they have essential roles to play.  Executives must create an environment where learning is easy and where knowledge can be shared transparently among the employees. This will ensure that information that is sought is found can be used instantly. For this to happen, executives need information technology as a communication, deployment, mechanism manifestation, and decision-making tool.

Conclusion

Knowledge management is essential for the growth and improvement of performance within an organization. It is crucial in the business world today to ensure that companies can retain their position in the business world and grow innovatively. Knowledge management helps to create efficiency within the workplace and provides faster and more effective decision-making. It develops organizational knowledge and also boosts collaboration among departments. The process of training and onboarding an employee is optimized, and employee retention rises as you have happier employees.

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Knowledge management should be a common practice in all businesses, no matter the field and purpose. It’s useful for both the internal and external development of the company. Benefits include optimizing teamwork, teaching newcomers, improving sales, and reviewing results.

And in the age of raging pandemic, knowledge management gains a new form and becomes more essential than ever. KM techniques and strategies become more flexible and adapt to the changes COVID-19 brought. After all, the inability to travel and attend meetings forced organizations to change most of their tactics.

The marketing field isn’t an exception. Knowledge management used to be helpful for optimizing commerce in the past. But nowadays, the connection becomes closer.

Why Is Knowledge Management Important for Marketing?

In brief, KM enhances efficiency and leads to faster, more constructive decision-making. Here are several benefits of implementing knowledge management practices:

●      Smarter specialists.
Your workforce learns from one credible source and becomes smarter. Consequently, it offers better ideas and potential marketing strategies.

●      Quick adaptation of newcomers.
New employees join the collective with ease and start working for the company’s benefit in shorter terms.

●      Lower turnover.
Employee turnover drops due to quick learning, thus increasing your reliability and authority.

●      Increased chances for beating the competition.
An intelligent company that works like one organism is always ahead of the competition. All teams, including marketers, detect and analyze vulnerabilities and find solutions to problems with lightning speed.

As market conditions are changing rapidly due to the new way of life we’re leading, a knowledgeable marketing team can:

●      React quickly to new trends;

●      Make fast, data-driven decisions that will make any situation beneficial for the company;

●      Offer better support and customer experience according to buyer’s needs;

●      Increase overall intelligence and efficiency of the team.

If we draw an analogy with a car maintenance service, then all the tools mentioned above represent a kind of a mechanic tool set. Each element of the set is responsible for a certain category of effects, and in the hands of a skilled craftsman, this set turns into a powerful "weapon".

It is quite understandable that each tool must be used to gain experience and hone skills. Try it and you will see the result.

3 Ways in Which Knowledge Management is Useful for Marketing

Marketing is all about knowledge. You need to know every detail about the market in general and the audience you want to get attention from. Customer data creates profiles leading strictly to the people who can benefit from your business. Further research helps to understand buyer’s intentions and demands.

As a result, small adjustments will create a strategy catering to the core of your target audience.

These three ways of incorporating KM in any marketing strategy will draw more attention and leads to your business.

1: Knowledge of Company Operation

Creating a KM system with the data about your company’s teams, hires, fires, feedback, and reviews will help to manage the marketing team, among all others. You will get valuable insight into your own organization’s work, see marketing results by month, and analyze the team’s performance.

This method allows for an objective view of the inside operation of the company.

2: Research of the Market

While new research must be conducted frequently, the analysis should include existing knowledge. Otherwise, there will be no data to compare the new results to. By adding the information you already have to current research, the marketing team understands the changes more deeply.

Such insights allow for building more adequate strategies and adapting them according to the patterns detected during analysis.

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3: Marketing and Sales Connection

Cross-team communication via knowledge management leads to data flow from one team to another. This method can fill many gaps focused research may leave. This flow has to be up-to-date and consistent to provide the best results.

Marketing and Sales teams are the closest to one another. And if each works in its own bubble, the lack of knowledge is unavoidable. To make data-based decisions, you need to be updated on the latest patterns, trends, and techniques each company uses.

2 KM Systems to Implement

Two central knowledge management systems will increase your marketing team productivity:

●      Shared research information.
While outlining a new project, create a file or a folder with all research data. Include everything about your target audience, partners, current market, and forecasts there. Then, share the folder or file with all teams, including marketing, as a base for further research and development.

●      Feedback compilation.

Gather feedback from all teams that took part in a project and ask customer support to share clients’ reviews. Create an easily accessible database everyone can turn to before making an important decision. Informed adjustments can improve marketing strategies significantly.

Common Issues with Knowledge Management in Marketing

The primary issue businesses may encounter is poor management. For instance:

●      High competitiveness between teams to the point where knowledge sharing is halted;

●      Poor analysis of marketing results and no knowledge acquired for the future improvements;

●      Lack of learning opportunities for new employees;

●      Poor distribution of information.

All knowledge management stages have to work like a clock, from gathering data to analyzing it and using results to make strategies better. Interaction between teams is also a crucial factor.

For example, the marketing team, along with doing its research, should be in touch with customer service. Cooperation helps to tackle commonly reported issues and adapt their techniques accordingly. The stage potential clients are in when approaching the ad, frequently asked questions, concerns, etc., have to be a part of marketing analysis. A good example is a photo processing website. They built the ability not only to communicate, but also to place an order in all convenient ways - a page on Facebook, Instagram, email and website.

The Prospects of KM Considering Tech Development

Incorporating KM and AI in marketing content creation will deliver better results. Chatbots are a great example of a knowledge base that offers answers to potential customers. The range of topics is diverse, from questions about your business strategy, goal, and the benefits you provide to product and service descriptions, prices, and special offers.

Some might think that KM may become a thing of the past due to technological development and the implementation of artificial intelligence and automation services. However, instead of substituting knowledge management, tech enhances it. This combination creates a whole new version of the practice.

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In the last two decades, the creation and enablement of knowledge as a source for an organization’s competitive advantage has been highly emphasized.  There has been a paradigm shift in how an organization's knowledge is now viewed and nurtured.

Knowledge Management is all about knowledge creation and the activities that support the creation and dissemination at various organizational levels. It starts from instilling a knowledge vision, building a collaborative culture, facilitating conversations, globalizing local knowledge, and encouraging creativity and innovation. The integration of the above processes leading to the generation of new sources of knowledge is the key to the success of any organization.

Knowledge can be both explicit and tacit. The knowledge that can be quantified and documented is explicit knowledge. It is tangible and can be conveyed through processes, documentation, books, videos, etc. However, this just forms only a fraction of any organization’s knowledge while the rest of the knowledge bound to peoples’ experiences, intuition, insights, expertise, and personal conclusions is the tacit knowledge. Recognizing the importance of this tacit knowledge and capturing it in a methodical way to make it explicit is a challenge for most organizations. The tacit knowledge may seem too fluid and inconsistent, but its fluidity is what makes it a powerful innovation tool. The conversion of tacit to explicit knowledge known as externalization is critical for an organization’s long-term success.

So how can organizations capture it?

Instilling a collaborative culture to encourage discussions and socialization among employees to get people talking about their experiences and observations, is how tacit knowledge can be assessed and used for the creation of new concepts and products.

How to do it:

Instill a knowledge-sharing culture – As the saying goes, lead by example. If leaders inculcate the culture of sharing their learning and experiences via forums like CoPs, stream, blogs, etc., people are sure to follow.

Create Best Practices directory – Encouraging a culture where people share best practices, not only enables collaboration but also saves the organization both time and money.

Nurture Community of Practices (CoPs) – The foundation of the CoPs is to connect people by encouraging conversation to build and share knowledge. The moderators should periodically reach out to its members to harvest and tag knowledge leading to its dissemination across borders and different organization levels.

Set up a Post-Mortem process – Put in place a process to document analysis and learnings from all team members at the end of each project. This will enable externalization and improvement in processes.

Set up exhaustive exit interview - These are no longer the times when an employee used to join an organization straight out of college and work till retirement. When a company loses its employee, it also loses the accompanying knowledge and experience. The need is to have an exhaustive exit strategy in place where outgoing people capture their experiences, feedback, contacts, insights, and a directory of work that can be passed onto the replacing employee to get a head start.

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