The Importance Of Knowledge Management Management Essay

The Importance Of Knowledge Management Management Essay Knowledge is quite distinct from data and information in nature. Data includes facts, observations, or perceptions which may or may not be true. Information, according to is the content that represents analyzed data. Knowledge is defined in an area as justified true beliefs about relationships among concepts relevant to that particular area. The skills required for effective knowledge management are to identify, generate, acquire, diffuse and capture the most valuable benefits of knowledge that sets up a strategic advantage to the organizations. Knowledge life cycle consists of: creation, mobilization, diffusion and commoditization to explain the early emerging knowledge to it maturity. INTRODUCTION The knowledge has been created more and more nowadays. The important of knowledge management is recognized and effectively implement by many organizations. In this brief essay, I will explain the differences between knowledge and information. After that, there will be the discussion of the importance of knowledge management in the organization as well as how effective knowledge management can create competitive advantage for the organization. Also, the essay explains the skills required to effectively implement knowledge management process in the workplace through the explanation of knowledge life cycle. NATURE OF KNOWLEDGE According to Fernandez (2004), to define knowledge, we need to distinguish it from data and information. Although they are sometimes used interchangeably, knowledge is quite distinct from data and information in nature. Firstly, data includes facts, observations, or perceptions which may or may not be true. By itself, data shows the raw numbers or assertions and may therefore be devoid of context, meaning, or intent. However, it can be easily captured, stored, and communicated using electronic or other media (Fernadez, 2004). For example, the schedule of movies will be show in a day, or observation of number of left-handers in a group of people illustrates data. Information, according to Dalkir (2005), is the content that represents analyzed data. Also, Fernandez (2004) defined information as a subset of data, which only includes those data that possess context, relevance, and purpose. It means that information manipulates raw data to obtain a more meaningful indication of trends or patterns in the data. For example, for the cinema director, the numbers indicating the daily sold tickets (in dollars, quality, or percentage of daily sales) of each movie are considered information. So, the director can use such information to make decisions concerning pricing and extra or cancel some movie shows. According to Fernandez (2004), there are two different ways to distinguish knowledge from data and information. The first one considers knowledge to be at highest level in a hierarchy with information at the middle level, and data to be at the lowest level. By this view, knowledge refers to information that enables action and decisions, or information with direction. Although, knowledge is the richest and deepest of the three, and is consequently also the most valuable, it is intrinsically similar to information and data. In the more complete perspective way, according to which knowledge is intrinsically different form information, knowledge is defined in an area as justified true beliefs about relationships among concepts relevant to that particular area (Nonaka, 1994). For example, the daily sold tickets can be used, along with other information such as information on the pop corns and soft drinks sold at the cinema, to compute the total revenue. The relationship between the information is an example of knowledge. Hence, as what I understand, knowledge is how people get information from data, or more valuable information from less valuable information. THE IMPORTANCE OF KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT IN THE ORGANIZATION Knowledge management was defined by Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995) as the process of applying a systematic approach to the capture, structure, management, and dissemination of knowledge throughout an organization in order to work faster, reuse best practices, and reduce cost of rework from project to project. It means that Knowledge management is the logical process that helps people to use knowledge effectively and efficiently. There are 4 business drivers that make knowledge management become important and increase in application for today according to Dalkir (2005). Firstly, the globalization of business means that the expansion of organization to global with multisite, multilingual, and multicultural in nature. The expansion results in the more complex work environment that all organizations have to face because of the increase in the number of subjective knowledge items. The second driver is the leaner organization. As the required work environment, people need to work faster and smarter as knowledge worker to adopting an increased pace and workload. Another business driver is the corporate amnesia. This driver explains that people as a workforce is no longer expect to spend entire work life with the same organization which will create problems of knowledge continuity for the organization and places continuous learning demands on the knowledge worker. Finally, technological advances make people more con nected. The advances in information technology not only have made connectivity ubiquitous but have radically changed expectations, which workers are expected to be on at all times. Base on the importance of the knowledge management, all organizations need to develop a suitable and effective approach to manage their knowledge. By doing so, they will get many benefits to create competitive advantages. At first, effective knowledge management approach will provide many benefits to each individual employees of the organization. It helps the employees in doing their job and save time through better decision making and problem solving. It builds a sense of community bonds within the organization and helps people to keep up to date. It also provides challenges and opportunities for employees to contribute. The effective approach also brings benefits to organization. It helps drive strategy for organization, solves problems more quickly, and diffuses best practices. Also, it improves knowledge embedded in products and services. It cross-fertilizes ideas and increases opportunities for innovation. In addition, it enables organizations to stay ahead of the competition be tter, and builds organizational memory. Therefore, in my point of view, knowledge management is essential for all type of business nowadays. With an effective knowledge management, the organization can facilitate collaboration and help knowledge worker connected. It also helps organization in making decision base on complete, valid and well interpreted data, information, and knowledge. LEADERSHIP AND THE SKILLS REQUIRED TO EFFECTIVELY IMPLEMENT KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT PROCESSES IN THE WORKPLACE Nowadays, most of organizations realize that the important of managing knowledge effectively. For doing so, they need to be always able to identify, generate, acquire, diffuse and capture the most valuable benefits of knowledge that sets up a strategic advantage to themselves. It also needs to have the ability to differentiate the information, which is digitizable, and true knowledge assets, which can only exist with in the context of an intelligent system (Dalkir, 2005). To be able to clearly understand the requirements for effectively implement knowledge management processes in the workplace, we may discuss the knowledge life cycle and strategies in each stages of the cycle. KNOWLEDGE LIFE CYCLE: Base on the research of Birmingham and Sheehan (2002), knowledge has a life cycle. Their study had showed that new knowledge is born as uncertainty thing, and it form into shape as it is tested, matures through implementation in reality, is diffused to a growing user, and finally becomes broadly understood and recognize as common practice. The knowledge can process through four stages of knowledge life cycle: creation, mobilization, diffusion and commoditization. Creation: At this stage, knowledge first appears in someoneà ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã¢â€ž ¢s head as an idea. In fact, no one can fully understand the idea or emerging knowledge, even if person creating it. In doing business, the suitable strategy in this early stage is to test the idea on its commercial viability. To encourage this activity, organizations need to create an environment which requires adjustments in the following areas: Informal Knowledge System: the organizations can lay out their space in an open plan that has many common areas, give their employees time to experiment, and provide resources for training programs and conferences in order to grow up knowledge effectively. Information Technology Systems: technology should be considered to connect people who have interest at highly specialized internet forums rather than to codify and store emerging knowledge. Human Resources: organizations regularly create knowledge should hire people in using new knowledge for critical feedback. External Relationship: the contact with external customers and suppliers will encourage the experimental of new idea. Mobilization: In this stage, knowledge continues to be improved, and the organization will extract more value from it. To achieve it, organizations need to mobilize knowledge internally and keep it away from outsiders. There are approaches for doing that: Informal Knowledge System: the organization can encourage the internal transferences among employees by building an internal network. Information Technology Systems: the IT should focus on technology that can enable the informal transfer of knowledge, and the system need to make it possible for adding comments on the subject from users. Human Resources: thinkers, doers, mavericks and pragmatists are needed in order to fully transform new ideas into valuable knowledge. External Relationships: it is still important to maintain strong relationship with customers and other partners in this stage. Diffusion: In this diffusion stage, the organizations will accept the leakage of knowledge, and no longer try to keep the knowledge under wraps. They will spread out the knowledge by selling it to outsiders. Again, the managers should consider following approaches in this stage: Informal Knowledge Systems: knowledge in this stage will be disseminated widely and quickly, which requires a system that focuses on training employees and encourage their use. Information Technology Systems: an extensive knowledge database will be useful for the organization during this stage. The competitive advantages will stem from the ease of access to information. Human Resources: customer consultants will be needed in this stage, so that they can work with customers and recognize the value of applying the knowledge to customersà ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã¢â€ž ¢ problems. External Relationship: organizations should focus on building strong customers relationship by their services, and using their brand to create the differences with other competitors. Commoditization: The organizations concentrate on managing knowledge that is already well known. The basic knowledge has been completely diffused. However, there are many opportunities to extract value from current knowledge to generate one in this stage. The approached to extract value as follow: Informal Knowledge Systems: in this stage, the use of formal knowledge systems will be more valuable than the informal one. The systems will help the organization to supply the best practices that can add value to well developed processes, and encourage new ways of commercializing existing knowledge. Information Technology Systems: organizations should develop effective search engines and retrieval systems because of the significant volume of documents that have gathered overtime. Human Resources: it is similar to the requirements of the diffusion stage. However, the demand for the knowledge may decline the demand for the jobs will be reduced. It is better to use the contract employees to solve this problem. CONCLUSION Base on my research, knowledge is much different from data and information. It is how people use data to crate valuable information and from less valuable information to more valuable one. In other words, knowledge in an area can be defined as justified true belief about relationships among concepts relevant to that particular area. Every organization needs to implement effectively its knowledge management processes due to four important drivers. By doing so, it will bring many benefits to the business as well as the individual employees. The organizations need to understand the knowledge life cycle in order to manage the knowledge. The cycle comprises four stages, which are creation, mobilization, diffusion, and commoditization, points out the essential skill needs to effectively implement knowledge management process.

Archimedes :: essays research papers

Archimedes is considered one of the three greatest mathematicians of all time along with Newton and Gauss. In his own time, he was known as "the wise one," "the master" and "the great geometer" and his works and inventions brought him fame that lasts to this very day. He was one of the last great Greek mathematicians. Born in 287 B.C., in Syracuse, a Greek seaport colony in Sicily, Archimedes was the son of Phidias, an astronomer. Except for his studies at Euclid's school in Alexandria, he spent his entire life in his birthplace. Archimedes proved to be a master at mathematics and spent most of his time contemplating new problems to solve, becoming at times so involved in his work that he forgot to eat. Lacking the blackboards and paper of modern times, he used any available surface, from the dust on the ground to ashes from an extinguished fire, to draw his geometric figures. Never giving up an opportunity to ponder his work, after bathing and anointing himself with olive oil, he would trace figures in the oil on his own skin. Much of Archimedes fame comes from his relationship with Hiero, the king of Syracuse, and Gelon, Hiero's son. The great geometer had a close friendship with and may have been related to the monarch. In any case, he seemed to make a hobby out of solving the king's most complicated problems to the utter amazement of the sovereign. At one time, the king ordered a gold crown and gave the goldsmith the exact amount of metal to make it. When Hiero received it, the crown had the correct weight but the monarch suspected that some silver had been used instead of the gold. Since he could not prove it, he brought the problem to Archimedes. One day while considering the question, "the wise one" entered his bathtub and recognized that the amount of water that overflowed the tub was proportional the amount of his body that was submerged. This observation is now known as Archimedes' Principle and gave him the means to solve the problem. He was so excited that he ran naked through the stre ets of Syracuse shouting "Eureka! eureka!" (I have found it!). The fraudulent goldsmith was brought to justice. Another time, Archimedes stated "Give me a place to stand on and I will move the earth." King Hiero, who was absolutely astonished by the statement, asked him to prove it.

Behaviorism the beginnings

Behaviorism is one of the most influential schools of psychology, especially American psychology. The development of behaviorism was spurned as a reaction to structuralism and functionalism. Behaviorism was posited as a revolution in the methodology of the science of psychology (Hothersall, 1995), while structuralism and functionalism have argued that the rightful object of study of psychology is the mind and consciousness and have developed methods that congruently were subjective and enabled the psychologists of that time to study the mind and consciousness.Although behaviorism has become established as a major force in psychology, in its earlier days it was not popular and embraced by many psychologists. However as behaviorism evolved and developed into a theoretically based and objective science many have found its assumptions practical and scientific. Western psychology’s history is short and colorful compared to other sciences, it started with structuralism from Germany with Wundt at the helm (Murphy, 1930). When psychology arrived in America it obviously followed structuralism, and since it was too philosophical for the American scholars.James developed his own paradigm and called it functionalism, which in essence focused on the function of consciousness in explaining behavior than in studying the structure of the mind. Functionalism held greater influence in American psychology but together with structuralism it still espoused that psychology is the study of the mind and consciousness. The zeitgeist of that period was that the focus of psychology is the understanding of the human mind and internal experiences (Hothersall, 1995).This inspired psychologists to devise methods of studying perception and consciousness in the attempt to discover the workings of the human mind. Research at that time was centered on identifying and describing physiological experiences and how it affected human behavior. Psychologists were comfortable with the notion tha t psychology is the study of the mind and most of them wrote about the self, attention, consciousness, perception and even mental processes that were believed to be the cause of human behavior.At this point, methods used to study the human mind were subjective and did not lend itself to replication and reliability which in turn questioned the veracity of psychological researches. Although functionalism stressed that the mind and consciousness were responsible for human actions, they viewed behavior as a product of mental processes and ignored its importance in the study of psychology. Functionalism however stressed the application of psychological knowledge to practical issues such as learning, education and organizational development.The pragmaticism of functionalism led it to the discovery that human behavior is as much important to study since it is directly related to the human mind. Functionalism also identified the shortcomings of structuralism and its methods and since it was heavily influenced by Darwin, functionalism also welcomed the idea of studying animals in laboratories to test psychological assumptions. While this new developments were gaining support, a new school of psychology emerged from the work and writings of Ivan Pavlov (Hothersall, 1995).Pavlov was able to demonstrate that a dog can be trained to salivate with just the sound of a bell intrigued some psychologists and became one of the most popular teachings in psychology; Pavlov called this process classical conditioning. In America, John B. Watson was impressed with the experiments of Pavlov that he embraced the idea that behavior is the mot important aspect of man that should be studied by psychology (Watson, 1913). John B. Watson was an influential person and he is conventionally credited to be the father of behaviorism as he strongly and eloquently articulated the new psychology of that time.Central to Watson’s argument was that he accepted that animal behavior is quite simil ar to human behavior and that they are legitimate subjects in the experimental study of behavior. Earlier, it was mentioned that behaviorism was revolutionary in the sense that it developed a methodology of study of psychology and that it held few theoretical explanations to human behavior. Watson (1913) posited that any behavior is a response to a stimuli and the relationship between the stimulus and the response should be the subject matter of psychology.Watson also erased the mental processes that the structuralism and functionalism was focused on, arguing that studying mental processes are futile and subjective and did not uphold the scientific and experimental tradition of the discipline. Watson became the editor of the Psychological Review, one of the earliest scientific journals in psychology and used his position in the paper to put forth his ideas and conceptualizations of psychology as the behaviorist would see it (Watson & Evans, 1990).Watson was a radical behaviorist, he always referred to himself as â€Å"the behaviorist† and it implied that he renounced all mental processes as devoid of any psychological insight. He reasoned that structuralism and functionalism are limited perspectives and it did not offer objective and rational explanations of behavior. He was famous for his experiments with Little Albert, wherein he conditioned fear of white and flurry objects in a small child. He demonstrated that fear can be conditioned and that it is manifested in different objects that fit the original object used as a stimulus (Watson, 1928).Watson believed that every action is a product of conditioning and that genetics or cultural orientations does not have anything to do with it. When asked to explain thinking, he said that thinking was not a mental process per se; instead it is an act of speaking in symbolic form (Watson, 1913). Watson’s intense dedication to behaviorism led him to believe that he can train any child to become what he wan ts them to be by subjecting them to the environment and experiences that would support this personality (Watson, 1928).Watson was a true-blooded behaviorist and this actually was the main criticism leveled against him. Psychologists who were trained in the functionalist and structuralist traditions had difficulty accepting Watson’s theories since it took out the mind and consciousness in psychology. There were a number of supporters but they also believed that mental processes are as much important as behavior. another criticism of Watson was that behaviorism was too deterministic, it seemed that the person had no free will since he/she is controlled by his/her environment.It can be remembered that psychology was the child of philosophy and for those who were trained in philosophical logic stressed free will, choice and freedom. Support for Watson waned in the later part of his career since he became too caught up in his assumptions on behaviorism that his contentions became too radical and lacked scientific credence. Watson’s major contribution to psychology is his emphasis on objective methods of research and the use of rats and animals in the study of psychology.Behaviorism became one of the great schools of thought in psychology because it evolved and developed into what we now know as modern behaviorism (Hothersall, 1995), a theoretical perspective that still focuses on human behavior as the object of study but have come to acknowledge the importance of mental processes, genetics and environmental experiences, as well as using methods that not only seek to elicit behavior but also gives due attention to thinking, attention, emotions and consciousness.References Hothersall, D. (1995). History of Psychology. New York: McGraw-Hill. Murphy, G. (1930). A Historical Introduction to Modern Psychology. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, Inc. Watson, J. (1913). Psychology as the behaviorist views it. Psychological Review, 20, 158-177. Watson, J. (1 928). The Ways of Behaviorism. New York: Harper & Brothers Publishing. Watson, R. & Evans, R. (1990). The great psychologists: An intellectual history 5th ed. New York: HarperCollins.

Tescos Customer Service Essay - 1603 Words

Tescos Customer Service Customer service is the most important aspect of any business. Without an adequate relationship with its consumer base, a company is at an enormous disadvantage. Today’s world competition is very strong in every kind of businesses. Every organisations must provide high quality products or services in order to survive, however their competitors also providing the same or comparable products or services. An important way to an organisation to get an edge over its competitors is to provide extra service to satisfy and delight their customers, which can retain them and also gain new customers. Therefore the achievement of customer satisfaction must be a major objective in all organisations. To achieve†¦show more content†¦Therefore, many different types of customer will visit Tesco. General public is the main group of customer of Tesco. General public mean anyone who might need the products or service. Everyone must need to visit the supermarket to buy some necessary products (e.g. food and milk). And many restaurants and take away shops will also buy their material in supermarket. Therefore, everyone also can be the customer of Tesco. We can always see male, female, families, and mothers with kids, single, disables, and students shop in a supermarket. Each of them have different needs and expectations, so Tesco have to provide a lot of facilities and a good customer service plan to meet all of their needs. The common needs and expectation of external customers: Information : The external customers of Tesco always expect the goods to be of high quality. They want to obtain the information on goods to know that it is of a high quality and they have to clarify and query detail. Honest dealing: The customers may need to ask for a refund if they are dissatisfied with the goods and make sure they can make a complaint. 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