How do you define and practice knowledge management

Budiarso, Consultant Accenture, Jakarta

So far, there is no standard definition of knowledge management. Some of the pioneers in this field have their own definitions.

To Karl-Erik Sveiby of Sweden, it is the art of creating value from intangible assets. According to Hubert Saint-Onge, it's about building the capability to create value. Ikujiro Nonaka, dubbed "Mr. Knowledge" by The Economist, prefers to use knowledge creation than knowledge management.

While the definitions of knowledge management is still not standardized, it has become a common term that spans varied initiatives, new processes, and in some cases new management functions.

Some organizations see it as little more than information management, while others see it as something far more complex, involving management of knowledge in all its forms.

Practitioners are united in their belief in the potential to increase productivity, quality, and innovation by changing the way that works gets done.

In general, knowledge could be divided into two.

The first, explicit knowledge, can be expressed in words and numbers and shared in the form of data, scientific formula, product specifications, manuals, universal principles, and so forth. This kind of knowledge can be readily transmitted across individuals formally and systematically.

The other one, tacit knowledge, is highly personal and hard to formalize, making it difficult to communicate or share with others. Subjective insights, intuitions and hunches fall into this category of knowledge. Furthermore, tacit knowledge is deeply rooted in an individual's action and experience, as well as in the ideals, values or emotions he or she embraces.

To convert tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge means findings a way to express the inexpressible. For tacit knowledge to be communicated and shared within the organization, it has to be converted into words or numbers that anyone can understand.

The distinction between tacit and explicit knowledge also determines who owns the knowledge. Explicit knowledge is most likely the property of the firm. One way or another it is either data or work product.

Tacit knowledge is most likely remains the property of the employees. Companies have certainly tried to own this knowledge. While they are employed by the company, employees are ethically -- and sometimes contractually -- prohibited from sharing their knowledge with competitors. But if the employees leave the firm, they'd take that knowledge and its inherent value with them.

Examples of knowledge management can be obtained from looking at the difference in the philosophical tradition of the West and Japan.

Western managers tend to emphasize the importance of explicit knowledge whereas Japanese managers put more emphasis on tacit knowledge. Western philosophy has a tradition of separating 'the subject who knows' from 'the object that is known', epitomized in the work of the French rationalist Descartes.

In contrast, the Japanese intellectual tradition placed a strong emphasis on the importance of the 'whole personality', which provided a basis for valuing personal and physical experience over indirect, intellectual abstraction. A sumo wrestler becomes a grand champion when he achieves shingi-ittai, or when the mind (shin) and technique (gi) become one (ittai).

At the end it matters less how you define knowledge management than how you practice it. It means nothing if you do not take knowledge and turn it into customer value.