PRESENTATION ON THE TOPIC:

KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT - ITS

BASIC TYPES

MEANING OF K.M:Knowledge management is fundamentally the management of corporate knowledge and intellectual assets that can improve a range of organizational performance characteristics and add value by enabling an enterprise to act more intelligently. Knowledge Management is a process that helps organizations identify, select, organize, disseminate and transfer important information and expertise that are a part of the organizational memory that typically resides within an organization in an unstructured manner.

TYPES OF KNOWLEDGE:SHALLOW AND DEEP KNOWLEDGE KNOWLEDGE AS KNOW HOW COMMON SENSE AS KNOWLEDGE PROCEDURAL KNOWLEDGE DECLARATIVE KNOWLEDGE SEMANTIC KNOWLEDGE EPISODIC KNOWLEDGE EXPLICIT AND TACIT KNOWLEDGE SOCIAL KNOWLEDGE EMBEDDED KNOWLEDGE

1. SHALLOW AND DEEP KNOWLEDGE:Shallow or readily recalled surface, knowledge indicates minimal understanding of the problem area. E.g. approval of loan application for secured loans of less than $1000depending on assets & salary would be based essentially on a few basic rules that hardly require human consultation. In contrast, a loan approval scheme that employs 14 variables would be more complex and risky. Deep knowledge acquired through years of experience would be required to decide on such a loan.

2.KNOWLEDGE AS KNOW HOW:Knowledge based on reading & training is much different from knowledge based on practical experience that spans many years. Knowledge based on know how is what is needed for building expert systems. The problem with practical experience is that it is rarely documented. Know how distinguishes an expert from novice. Experts represent their know how in terms of heuristics , rules of thumb based on their experienceempirical knowledge.

3.COMMON SENSE AS KNOWLEDGE:Common sense is type of knowledge that all human beings possess in varying forms and in varying amounts. It is a collection of personal experiences and facts acquired over time and the type of knowledge that human tend to take for granted. e.g. if someone asked you to look up Shakespeare's phone no. you would know that such a task is impossible. Common sense tells you that Shakespeare is dead and that the telephone was not invented until years after his death.

4. PROCEDURAL KNOWLEDGE:It is an understanding of how to do a task or carry out a procedure. It is knowledge contained in the application of a procedure. Procedural knowledge usually involves psychomotor skills such as holding onto the handrail while riding an escalator. e.g. when a person learns a language and speaks it fluently, it becomes a natural part of the person. In the case of an expert, when the same knowledge is used over & over again in a procedure, it comes to be used automatically.

5.DECLARATIVE KNOWLEDGE:It is information that experts can easily discuss. Unlike procedural knowledge, it is awareness knowledge , or routine knowledge of which the expert is conscious.. It is shallow knowledge that is readily recalled, because it is simple uncomplicated information. This type often resides in short term memory, the part of the brain that retains information for brief periods of time. It kicks in when you are at an airport and decide to call a friend in the area e.g. you look up the friends phone no. in the phonebook & memorize it well enough to dial it. Chances are by the time you have boarded the flight and you will have forgotten the number. You remembered it only long enough to dial it.

6.SEMANTIC KNOWLEDGE:It is a deeper kind of knowledge. It is highly organized, chunked knowledge that resides in long term memory. Such knowledge may have been used so often that the information seems like second nature. Semantic knowledge includes major concepts, vocabulary facts and relationships. Semantic knowledge about the system would consists of understanding about the battery, lights ,the ignition system & so forth and their inter relationships. On the basis of this knowledge, one can build rules about casual relationships among those things.

7. EPISODIC KNOWLEDGE:It is knowledge based on experimental information or episodes. Each episode is chunked in long term memory. In general, the longer a human expert takes to explain or verbalize his or her knowledge, the more semantic or episodic it is. An interesting aspect about episodic knowledge is that its use is automated. e.g., have u ever driven from point A to point Band yet not remembered many details of how you got there ? This is a common experience. Driving information is so chunked that most people have trouble remembering and explaining it. In the process of conveying the experts knowledge , the expert explains by examples or scenarios.

8. EXPLICIT AND TACIT KNOWLEDGE:EXPLICIT:This type of knowledge is formalized and codified, and is sometimes referred to as know-what .It is therefore fairly easy to identify, store, and retrieve. This is the type of knowledge most easily handled by KMS, which are very effective at facilitating the storage, retrieval, and modification of documents and texts.

From a managerial perspective, the greatest challenge with explicit knowledge is similar to information. It involves ensuring that people have access to what they need; that important knowledge is stored; and that the knowledge is reviewed, updated, or discarded.

Cont..
TACIT :- It is sometimes referred to as know-how and refers to intuitive,
hard to define knowledge that is largely experience based. Because of this, tacit knowledge is often context dependent and personal in nature. It is hard to communicate and deeply rooted in action, commitment, and involvement. Tacit knowledge is also regarded as being the most valuable source of knowledge, and the most likely to lead to breakthroughs in the organization.. It is used to create explicit knowledge and is best communicated personally through dialogues and scenarios, with use of metaphors. Therefore, knowledge is not private but social. Socially relayed knowledge becomes part of the real-life experience of the knower.

9. SOCIAL KNOWLEDGE
We can define social knowledge as "a result of the connections between the individual members of society, resident in no single one of them, but rather a property of the society working as a whole". They point out that social knowledge is "not merely the aggregation and averaging of individual knowledge" noting such an aggregation is unlikely. The road to knowledge is via people, conversations, connections and relationships. Knowledge surfaces through dialog, all knowledge is socially mediated and access to knowledge is by connecting to people that know or know who to contact. The social Knowledge website considers themselves a collection of peer community networks. They foster online communities so that people with similar interests can connect to harness the distributed expertise of the members. they state "The participants collaborate and manage their community while constantly providing feedback that is used to shape and extend the features of each Social Knowledge Network.

10. EMBEDDED KNOWLEDGE:Embedded knowledge refers to the knowledge that is locked in processes, products, culture, routines, artifacts, or structures. Knowledge is embedded either formally, such as through a management initiative to formalize a certain beneficial routine, or informally as the organization uses and applies the other two knowledge types. Culture and routines can be both difficult to understand and hard to change. Formalized routines on the other hand may be easier to implement and management can actively try to embed the fruits of lessons learned directly into procedures, routines, and products. It is important to note, that while embedded knowledge can exist in explicit sources (i.e. a rule can be written in a manual), the knowledge itself is not explicit, i.e. it is not immediately apparent why doing something this way is beneficial to the organization.