Knowledge Management

From google search: "The most comprehensive web site that I have found on Knowledge Management." - Karl-Erik Sveiby

http://www.kmnetwork.com/WhatIsKM.html#whatis

Its definition for KM is:

"Knowledge Management caters to the critical issues of organizational adaptation, survival, and competence in face of increasingly discontinuous environmental change.... Essentially, it embodies organizational processes that seek synergistic combination of data and information processing capacity of information technologies, and the creative and innovative capacity of human beings."

My understanding about KM is that it reconstructs, reforms or reorganizes the information and knowledge into a more meaningful and accessible way to facilitate people who need it to use.

One thing I feel important in the paper is that "Data are raw facts and numbers which can be informative buy by themselves provide little value for decision making". A case in point is from my research in computational biology. We have bunch of data from sfmg company about DNA sequence and geanology. But the people in the company don't konw how to utilize those information and then they employ students in the CS department to make the best use of the data. Only when the raw data are put into "context" and the "relations between daa and context are understood", can we find a satisfied solution to harness those data.

Another point that is impressive to me is about workforce knowledge management. "An astonishing 42 percent is stored in emplyees 'heads'".(Malhotra, 2001). I can see that if companies can fully or further share and utilize those precious experience and knowledge in the employees' minds, they can save plenty of time, energy and money. And I think that it is very likely that older employees may have more valuable to share than the younge ones. But I really feel regrettable that companies in China are laying off tons of experienced employees and losing one their "human assets". I hope when I go back to my country, I will be able to contribute to improve the current situation.